Once your business is established and running well, you may be inclined to let things continue to run as they are. However, it's actually a good time to plan again. After the crucial early stages, you should regularly review your progress and identify where you can take your business next. Often we become consumed by the day-to-day and forget to look at the bigger picture in securing the future of your business.
The first step is to meet with your outsourced accounting team to review your company’s books. When things are going well, it’s easy to glance over your reports. When things are difficult, you tend to look at things more carefully. Ultimately, it is a best practice to look carefully at your books even in an upswing.
Reviewing and knowing what you can easily cut from your budget versus what you can’t because your business depends on it is important. By understanding all of your expenses, you’ll get a more realistic picture of how much revenue you need to stay afloat. If your revenue is above the cut line, you can survive. Keeping this big picture in mind allows for you to plan for the future and be prepared in a crisis.
Meeting with an outsourced accounting team can take the pressure of keeping up off your shoulders. You can be given quarterly reporting, monthly, and even weekly notifications of the financial health of your business. Things change quickly and you might not realize how bad things are getting until it's too late if you are not on top of the books.
Reports from your accounting team are a helpful tool but show your past rather than your future. You don’t need to just know what has happened; you want to know what is coming. ProNexus can provide you with FP&A support to help analyze how your business is doing and provide insights on where to go next.
Furthermore, a regular assessment of your business in the age of technology can highlight weak areas within your business procedures and make sure you are running efficiently on the most up-to-date systems. A shift in technology can make existing products obsolete and create markets for new products or services almost overnight. Entrepreneurs don’t usually complain when business is booming, but your company can grow too fast – and that can mean trouble if you are not prepared. When business is booming, customer service can suffer or manufacturing may not be able to keep up with demand, for example. Some companies even find that their basic organizational structures no longer fit their new dimensions. If your business experiences similar growing pains, look at your business plan to identify the parts that need to change in order to accommodate the good news – and your increasing size.