The litmus test for each of your strategic objectives is that it has to meet each of these five criteria. If the objective fails to meet one or more of these criteria, then either assess it to determine if it is truly strategic, or revise it to make it more specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time bound.
Strategic objectives should be selected to address the major challenges facing the company. To make these SOs manageable and actionable, limit them to no more than eight, and it’s vital to prioritize them.
Many small businesses are structured as S corporations of LLCs, which means the owner’s personal taxes are intimately tied to their businesses. The flow-through income from the business has to be reported on the owner’s tax returns.
Many employees respond best when they feel their company cares about them and their ideas. Unhappy employees are less likely to perform at their best. How do you show you care?
In addition to checking the data accuracy and closing the books, you should think about and plan for the up-coming year. Be sure your tax objective is aligned with your business goals.
Closing the books means you are ending your official accounting period so you can start the next period with a clean slate. It means that once the books are “closed” there will be no more changes to the financial documents for the closed period. So accuracy is critical. The closed books are the “gospel” of what has happened in the financials for your company.
In the last blog post we talked about creating an operating budget. This is a blueprint of your operations to help you chart the growth
Start by reviewing the numbers that show your actuals (from your P&L report), your forecast (based on where you think you can make adjustments), and the difference or variance for each line item. Now you have a working budget!
It might make it easier (and more palatable) to think of budgeting as profit planning. If you have a profit plan in place, then you can truly track your income and expenses in a fashion that gives you a clear plan as to how to increase your revenues and where to cut your overhead.
And like any disease, a toxic employee can subtly spread counterproductive attitudes and actions to other employees. Employees who were productive but lacked the strength to overcome the negative forces become carriers of the disease, and so the toxicity spreads. Over time, the entire company can be infected.
What is it that prevents small businesses from successfully implementing useful back office systems? Usually it is the business owner. Small business owners often lack the knowledge, the time, and the help they need to create useful systems and make them work to their advantage. And a lot of business owners don’t think they need systems. That’s where they are mistaken.
The chain of command provides a clear line of responsibility from the executive suite on down. As part of the structure, you need to give employees a procedure to move up the chain if their concerns are not resolved.