SERVICES

Knowing what your business is telling you, making sure that information is accurate and then being able to decide on the correct actions to take to improve overall performance is why all business owners need good business intel. Not paying attention to this type of information can be very detrimental to the long-term success of any business. Those owners and managers who have decided to develop ways to use their business intelligence and further establish tools to help guide their organizations and utilize individuals with the skill and experience using those tools are much better prepared for any number of changes their business could be facing in their future.

Quite often business owners feel they intuitively know through past experience and instinct what is happening in their business. They are pretty successful and don’t feel the need to look deeper into the numbers or look at other types of business intelligence to make sure what they are feeling truly is happening. They might feel as long as they are there, with their hands on the pulse, they assume their business should continue with that same level of success.

However, as a business owner or manager, you will not always be there. With today’s fast changing business environment and world economy presenting much more competition from new products, services and competitors which may not have existed several years ago, not to mention the frequently changing buying habits of customers, the need today for your business to gather all available business intel and use it to your advantage has never been more necessary.

How best to collect and analyze all available business intelligence should be added to your strategy and planning. We can help you determine and review your BI and create and implement new processes, plus assist in training your staff with the tools necessary to make better informed decisions on your business’s future.

We totally understand if you find yourself in a situation where you have gotten way behind. You have been working on your business and focusing on growing customers, product and sales which have been your main priorities. Keeping your books in order and up to date was simply not a high priority.

We can help you get back on track and up to date so you, your tax accountant and your banker will have current financial information. Having your financial reports completed, your checking, savings, credit card, loans and other balance sheet accounts balanced, reconciled and current, no matter how far back we need to go, will certainly give you needed information as well as peace of mind.

After the cleanup, we can help you assess what future steps could or should be taken, and together determine how best to proceed from there.

This cleanup is typically a one-time service and there is no commitment from you to continue using our other services. However, we offer them and hope you continue working with us in the best way you see fit. In any case, once the cleanup is complete and you are up to date, you will be able to get back to running your business.

Defining how something is done, or the steps needed to complete something, is referred to as a process. Good process documentation in business can be used to capture tribal knowledge, increase consistency and aide in employee training on how your business operates which can lead to increased success and minimize mistakes. Following a standardized process will create repetition which can increase efficiency, reduce errors and the need for rework, which can save you money.

Many times in small businesses, there exist individuals with “Tribal Knowledge”, which is a term used to describe information not commonly known by others, but only a select few within your company. This knowledge should be captured and documented by the business so it can be shared and used to train others as well as to minimize the possible risk of losing it if any of those individuals where no longer employees of your company.

Documenting processes with a level of detail that can produce mostly the same outcome every time, as well as mapping and flow charting a graphical view of the relationships between different steps can help you visualize the need for different processes and explain to others how things work. It can also help show how or where improvements can be made within your business, if the processes are reviewed and updated periodically.

Besides the operational value your collection of documented processes and procedures can bring to your business, they can also become part of your intellectual property and could add intrinsic value to the overall worth of your business and be an attractive selling point to a would-be buyer.

Process documentation can help your business in many areas, some of which are:

When you first started your business, you may or may not have done much business planning, much less any real modeling on how you intended your business to actually make profits, or after your business was up and running adjusted your model to further finetune and show how profits are made. Like most entrepreneurs, you more than likely just pushed forward through any challenges and did what was needed to be done, learned from your mistakes and built the level of success you have today.

By going through the school of hard knocks and overcoming your challenges you more than likely now see how you could do it differently and the value a good plan and model would have done to aide you in making some of your earlier decisions. Now you may want to spend more time planning and building out a model to show you the directions you should be going and avoiding some obstacles in advance. A better way would be to plan and model out what you want your business’s future to look like, what goals you may want it to accomplish and what will it take for those goals to be realized.