A few years ago, together with the support of a national association of Accountants, we undertook some research to establish what every successful business does every year in relation to their numbers.
From this research our ‘Making The Numbers Work’ and Business Mentoring Programme were established.
We strive every day to make the numbers work in your business for your success and our programme integrates the 8 steps established from the research, with our traditional compliance support.
Of course, different businesses will approach the 8 steps in a different way, hence why we personalise our compliance and business development support within the Business Mentoring Programme.
So, how does it all fit together?
Although our programme covers the 8 steps, it is a continuous loop of progress.
Step one is to actually decide on what you want to achieve. What is your vision? What are your goals and objectives?
Once you really know what is important to you, then you can establish your key success drivers. These are the numbers, often related to positive activity, that drive the development and success of your business.
Step two, looks to identify and measure these drivers on a regular basis to manage your key performance.
Step three is where our traditional compliance support kicks in with the preparation of your annual accounts. However, this is not just the preparation and the calculation of your tax liabilities, but also the true understanding of how the annual performance of your business reflects on the areas you identified in step one. We will also use financial ratios to evaluate the overall performance of the business.
With the completion of your financial records, we are also able to explore two key areas.
Firstly, a comparison to your previous years to identify trends or patterns that need to be addressed or built upon.
It is also a time to compare your performance against others in your industry. This benchmarking enables you to compare your performance against your competitors. For example, are your margins better or worse? This evaluation also highlights if the good or poor performance is due to you and your team or an industry wide issue.
Step 6 is then a valuation of the business. We use a consistent, year on year, method to value your business in line with your industry norm. This will show how your performance reflects in the valuation of the business and is especially worthwhile if your goal is valuation driven (eg exit planning).
Our experience in helping Small Business Owners to develop their business, then completes steps 7 and 8, where we take the opportunity to explore and calculate how much more profitable and valuable your business could be.
Once we have established the improvement potential for your business based on our sensitivity analysis comparisons, then we work with you to create a Performance Improvement Plan, to establish how practically this can be delivered in your business.
As mentioned, this then goes full circle into the New Year, with a reflection that this performance improvement plan aligns with step one, your goals and objectives, before then establishing the latest measures required …….
For more details of our 8 step Business Mentoring Programme, that combines the traditional accounts compliance work we do for you with our business development support, then please click here or why not call us on 01865 379272 for a discussion about how this programme can support you.
