1 October has to be the best day of the year. Not only is it one of the nicest times to go for a run along the beautiful Manly beach but it is the most important time of reflection for your business.
By now you would have had a look at your first quarter’s results and seen what has unfolded. Do you like what has happened or have you underperformed? When you sat down in June and planned the year ahead, are you on track to meet your goals or falling miserably behind?
If you have hit your targets and have done what you said you were going to do, well done. Time to put the past 90 days behind you and focus on the December quarter and make sure you hit 2 quarter’s in a row. Just remember, it’s all well and good when you are hitting your targets but what don’t you see? Always ask yourself this question. Ask others this question. It’s what you don’t see that bites you!
If you are not hitting your targets, 1 October is a great time to reflect about what went wrong as you still have another 3 quarter’s to turn things around. If you have another bad quarter, it’s going to be bloody hard to catch up! Was it your sales or your expenses that underperformed? Do you have a cash problem? Can’t think of things to take your business to the next level? Staffing problems? When you set your 3-5 priorities at the start of the quarter did you achieve these? If so, why did you still underperform? If not, why didn’t you achieve them and how do you go about achieving them as quickly as possible?
You are in trouble if you don’t know the answers to these questions. You need to find the answers and the right answers only come from asking the right questions
We have completed our quarterly update yesterday, we beat our budgeted sales by 2.3% and our operating expenses by 2.4%. Not that big but a win is a win! We focused on this for about 15-20 minutes and then turned our attention to the next quarter and boy do we have a quarter lined up! This only comes from a considerable amount of time spent on the right type of planning. This is the key, many business’s get bogged down in the detail when they plan. Planning needs to take out the detail and focus on top-level activities. The detail comes later.
We are currently going through our quarterly update with a lot of our clients, if you need a hand, you know who to call.