This means making your dollar work for you by investing it where you’ll get the best return, monitoring its movement through your business and supplementing it with additional funds to support the growth of your business.
You need to track the actual movement of cash around your business by getting to know your cash to cash cycle and making improvements to it to make your cash work more efficiently and free up lazy cash that’s available in your business for use.
Cash power is vitally important as, without it, your business will grind to a halt and any growth initiatives will lack investment dollars.
If you’re already maximising your dollar, you should investigate external funding sources that can support your growth activities, such as lending, grants, tax concessions and investors that can provide the additional dollars you need.
Business owners need access to information that helps them manage the current business and make decisions for the future.
This knowledge comes from having the right internal systems and processes that gather information about the business such as new business leads and conversions, sales, profitability of customers and products, delivery timeframes, average transaction values, returns and complaints, costs to the business and many other KPIs that might be important to your business.
Having this information to hand means business owners can be kept up to date, monitor the activities and performance of the business, spot issues and opportunities and make decisions based on fact.
The best laid plans come to naught, if you don’t have the information, resources, mindset and processes to see it through to fruition.
For small businesses, this generally means the business owner needs to have capability and capacity to execute their ideas and the leadership skills to ensure their team supports and helps drive growth initiatives.
This generally means you need to be in touch with your customers, staff and any experts you rely on for their specialist knowledge and skills to supplement the gaps in your own knowledge and experience.
It also means you need to be able to rise above the day-to-day issues and have systems and processes that allow your team to take care of those activities, freeing you to work on the business and drive these initiatives.
Constantly focusing on these five areas will build and maintain the power of your business and ensure you grow, remain relevant and avoid becoming a weakling business that “eats sand” when you stand off against your competitors.
Marc Peskett is a director of MPR Group, a Melbourne based business that provides business advisory, capital raising, grants services, as well as tax, outsourced accounting, finance lending and wealth management to fast growing small to medium enterprises. MPR Group is a member of the Proactive Accountants Network. You can follow Marc on Twitter @mpeskett
