Everything you do as a business owner must be focused around generating, protecting, leveraging, growing etc. cash-flow.

Many small business owners get started on their own and at the beginning focus 90% of their time and energy on getting dollars in the door…. However as soon as the business begins to grow what happens? You hire someone to take over sales and pretty soon you realize you are in financial trouble until you roll up your sleeves and bail the company out again.

There are four critical areas a small business needs to work on in order to ensure proper cash flow.

These are:

• Strategy
• Alignment
• Growth
• Optimization

Why are these so important and how do they apply. Here is an overview, for more details on each topic please visit our Services List.

You must start by determining the best possible strategy for your company. Having the right strategy is the difference between a successful company and one that will fail or merely eek out an existence. Why is that? A strategy provides a direction. More then just a vision of where you want to go it is the reason you want to go there and the possible routes you have to make it. Instead of just “doing” the next thing like a rudderless boat you can challenge each new idea and concept, each new hire, each new investment against your strategy and quickly determine if it fits or if it doesn’t.

Do you know your strategy?

Do your employees know it?

Do your customers care about your strategy?

Next you need to align your people, your operations, your marketing and sales with this strategy. Every message that goes out, every person involved and every dollar becomes focused on working on the business to produce the maximum results possible.

The last $50,000 you spent…. Did you get the highest possible return on investment? How about the last 5 dollars you spent? Are your people all pulling in the same direction?

Thirdly you must pursue growth - aggressively. You need to focus on the top accounts for your business. You need to maximize your current customer database, pursue an aggressive and formalized referral program, set up joint ventures, strategic alliances and mutually beneficial relationships with any business that provides return value to a mutual client base. There are only overriding ways to grow a business, either you get more customers, sell more to the ones you have or charge higher prices. You must find multiple ways to do each of these and do each of these well.

How many different ways of generating revenue does your company utilize? If your sales people stopped cold-calling tomorrow or whatever general activity they do today, would your business survive?

Who is already selling to your customer base, non-competing products that you could leverage?

The fourth phase is optimizing. You must take a deep look at critical aspects of your business to ensure maximum performance, revenue and cost savings. Take a look at best practices in your industry and best practices in other industries in order to maximize efficiency, effectiveness and accountability. Address technology, administrative functions, human performance, in essence any policy, process or procedure that can be made better needs to be and those involved in it must have the policies and procedures in place so as to follow them.

Are you doing daily activities in your company just because that is the way it was always done?

What would happen if things where done faster, better, right the first time?

In order to go deeper into this contact us for our FREE Marketing Audit Report to see how your business stacks up in these four areas.

If the analysis makes sense to you then call us to set up a free 2 hour Business Optimization Seminar which will teach you how to take a fresh look at your business and give you ideas to jump-start your business.