The start of a new financial year is an opportunity to take a deep breath, step back and look objectively at your business. This is often overlooked when you are immersed in the day-to-day operations, particularly during the challenging times of COVID-19. Future business success is a result of considered strategic planning, implementation of plans, regular review, and refinement. See below our tips you could utilise for your own strategic business planning.
Strategy & Reflection Sessions
• Reflect on what’s happened in the past and identify what worked, what needs tweaking, and what definitely did not work.
• Identify challenges impeding your business.
• Determine where you envisage the business and yourself personally going in the short, medium, and long term.
Identify Your New Year Goals
• Now that you have a better roadmap of where you wish the business to go in the future, determine what your goals are for the new financial year.
• Your new year goals should form part of a cohesive strategy that is aligned to your short, medium, and long-term business roadmap.
Forecasts & Modelling
• Good financial forecasts should be prepared by experts to model how your new business goals can be viable and sustainable.
• The financial forecasts may also show that your goals are not sustainable in its current form and you may have to go back to the drawing board and change your strategy.
• Prepare detailed budgets.
Additional Resources
• Once you have identified your strategy, goals and are confident that it is financially viable, you need to identify what additional resources are required by the business to make it happen.
• Human Resources: Do you have the expertise in-house? Do you need to engage experts or hire additional staff? Do you need to re-train existing staff?
• Funding: Do you need to seek additional borrowing or investors?
• For example, if your goal was to introduce a new product line: Do you need new machinery & equipment or premises to produce the new product? Do you have the necessary licenses and accreditation to produce the new product? Have you undertaken the R&D and market survey to be confident the new product will be well received by the market?
Implementation Plan
• Putting your new strategy and goals into action will be a step-by-step process and will require careful planning.
• Prepare and document an implementation plan and this may be done over multiple stages.
• Have a timeline for each stage.
• Assign person/s responsible for each stage and ensure the resources required for each stage are available.
Regular Review & Fine Tuning
• Implementing your plan is not the end of it!
• You will now need to review the effectiveness and performance of your implementation plan.
• Did it go to plan? What worked? What needs tweaking? What didn’t work?
• Seek feedback from key stakeholders (such as your staff, customers, business owners).
• Engage an expert to bring your accounting records up to date and provide accurate reports on the financial performance of your implementation plan.
• A good virtual CFO can guide you in the review and assessment process and help you with fine-tuning and planning the next steps.
Please contact us to find out more. The team at EMspire Advisory are experienced bookkeepers, accountants,
and on-call CFOs in Sydney and would like to help you create, grow and succeed in business.
Please note that this information is not specific and is general in nature and cannot be relied upon as advice. Please contact us for specific advice for you and your circumstances.