6 Simple Things Your Business Needs To Thrive (That Your Accountant Fails At*!)
About the Author: Ashley Thomson
How can I tell you what your accountant isn’t doing? Well, before I became a Business Coach, I was an accountant for 10 years. In fact, technically I still am, but I don’t do accounting anymore.
The truth is – I decided to move when I came to notice that: All businesses, successful or struggling, have an accountant. In fact, every business that went under (and there are literally thousands every year) has an accountant. The work I was doing was not helping business owners thrive and I am passionate about helping people create and live the life they want.
I’ve got a lot of accounting friends who will be reading this, so before I start receiving break-up texts, let me be clear… This just isn’t their role! Sure, a good accountant will meet with you at the end of the year, they’ll have a chat to you and explain your trading results with an explanation as to what it all means. But, in the best case, these include trading from 12 months ago… for those of you who are lodging to the May deadline, some of the results are almost 2 years old!! It is not their job to understand your financials and translate this into daily and weekly targets for you and your staff. That’s YOUR job!
As a business coach, I regularly talk to business owners about their financial information. I regularly get the response – “I don’t know all of the financial stuff – I’ve got an accountant or bookkeeper for that.” Let me be clear –You are in business to make money – if you don’t know the “financial stuff” every week, then you are not making as much money as you could be!
Imagine the coach of a football team, coaching for a whole game without knowing the score. If you are a business owner and you don’t have regular reports to know where you stand all of the time, then you are basically coaching without knowing the score!
As Warren Buffet said “If you can’t read the scoreboard, you don’t know the score. If you don’t know the score you can’t tell the winners from the losers”.
If you are serious about making your business 1. Grow and 2. Thrive, then I cannot overstate the importance of this. It doesn’t have to be a 10 page comprehensive profit and loss statement or big, complicated spreadsheets from expensive programs. The business owners I mentor can see their scoreboard from the beach on their phone by receiving just 1 email from their bookkeeper.
To start reading the scoreboard in your business just follow these six basic steps for any business and you’ll be on the right track:
- Establish the key drivers of your business success (this is the first thing we tackle after commencing a business coaching engagement with a client),
- Work out how much activity/results you need within each to get the profit you want,
- Relate to the team your expectation in terms they can relate to,
- Implement a system to Track and Report on the actual activity,
- Have your bookkeeper email the report to you on Friday @ 3:00 PM, and then
- Start to relax, in the knowledge that you are now in control of your future!
Small Business doesn’t need to be difficult, you just need to start keeping score!
Unsure of where to start? Give us a call at Tenfold Business Coaching.
Image credit: Whiteboard one plus one cc by HubSpot (contact)
