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Strategic Plan – What does this mean?

Sep27

Your strategic plan for the business should aim to set a target for what your business will look like in 5 years time or when it is complete. This can cover profits, type of business, business size, value, products, market position, unique selling points, etc. It is your vision of what it will look like.

You do firstly have to decide if the business you are in or are looking at is capable of delivering what you are pursuing. If it’s not an opportunity worth pursuing, it doesn’t matter how much you plan it, it won’t deliver what you want.

Your business strategy should be based on your standards and values if it is to tie in with your life plan.

Without this plan of where you are aiming to get to, it makes it far harder to get there. By having goals, it makes it easier to determine if what you are doing is moving you towards that goal or not and you can plan to put everything in place to get there.

It enables you to identify the key challenges that need to be overcome if you are to reach your goal. Once you know the challenges, the cause and the real effect of not meeting them, you can identify the most fundamental challenges and then establish how to overcome them.

Here are the kind of things to consider in the strategic objective for your business of what your business will look like in 5 years time and when it is complete…

  • What type of business will you have?
  • What products and services do you offer?
  • How large is the business with reference to turnover, gross profit, costs and net profit?
  • What will the growth be over the period with regards to sales, new products, new markets, and number of employees?
  • What will be your market position?
  • What reporting systems will you use?
  • How will your employees be trained?
  • What geographic markets will you supply?
  • What will be unique about the business and what will be your unique selling points with regards to distinctive products, marketing, operations and customer service.
  • How much is your business worth now and on completion?

Research on goal setting has proven the following helps people achieve their goals…

  • It’s better to set your goals high rather than low.
  • Write down your goals. People who write down their goals are far more likely to reach them. There is a saying, “if you don’t write something down, it doesn’t exist”.
  • You can keep refining you goals and reviewing them as you go along. Things do change.
  • Goals should be SMART goals to achieve the best results.  This stands for:
  1. Specific – how much, for whom, for what, etc
  2. Measurable
  3. Achievable
  4. Relevant
  5. Time framed – by when

For example, having a goal to get rich is not a smart goal. However a goal of “to have £100,000 in the bank in 5 years time” could be a smart goal. It’s far easier to put the specific steps in place to achieve this type of goal.

  • Goals such as “to be the best at what you do” or “to love what you do” tend to lead to people being more successful than “to make lots of money” goals. The money does come but it is a result of having more meaningful goals in the first place

Now we know where we’re going, we have to get there…

Please view our Bookkeeping system video

If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.

Applying Pareto’s Law in your Business

Sep20

This is the law that suggests things like 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers?

Or the 20% of customers who give you 80% of your grief.

Pareto’s Law can help to identify the 20% that most of your effort should be concentrated on. You may not even need the other 80% at all.

Perhaps the same is true of many of other things – 80% of your sales come from 20% of your sales force or perhaps 80% of your employee problems are caused by 20% of your employees.

Always look to see with everything if the extra 20% you get is worth the 80% of input. It can be a very useful law for identifying where you can make the biggest changes in your business.

Please view our Bookkeeping system video

If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.

Time Management for Small Business

Sep13

With the average 40-year-old man having just 180,000 waking hours left to live, it’s important to make the best use of them. Here is a list of  top time management tips for you to apply…

  • Prioritise your workload.
  • Write a priority action list at the end of each day, ready for tomorrow.
  • See the job through – don’t start, put it down and come back to it as it wastes time getting started again.
  • Delegate wherever possible. Especially unimportant jobs.
  • Hold efficient meetings. Consider if they are needed at all? Holding meetings standing up or on the phone will shorten them and avoid wasted chitchat.
  • Say “NO” if you’re not the right person to ask.
  • Put time aside when colleagues know you’re not to be interrupted each day.
  • Don’t do everything to perfection. Being 100% perfect takes twice as long as 90% perfection, which is often good enough.
  • Use call logging sheets, not scraps of paper, to record phone calls.
  • Distinguish between urgent and non-urgent interruptions. Something that is important isn’t always urgent.

If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.

Starting your own Business – Problems

Sep6

Lots of people dream of having their own small business. Why work for someone else when there is less job security and they are expecting more and more work from you?

However it is overlooked that to run a successful business, especially in the early years you need…

  • Motivation
  • Focus
  • Capacity to work hard
  • Self –reliance
  • Support of your family
  • A skill or a good product.

Starting your own business takes determination, perseverance and self-discipline. Beware if you are starting for negative reasons, perhaps just because you dislike your boss or you like drinking in pubs and so thought it would be great to run a pub. Running your own business is a big step. Take time to consider and plan.

It’s not playing golf when you want and taking holidays when you want. There can be a lot of admin and red tape to deal with. The customer becomes your boss and they pay your wages.

Of all the tens of thousands of people who still start a business of some sort…

  • By the end of the first year, 40% will have failed.
  • Within 3 years, 56% will have failed.
  • Within 5 years, 76% will have failed.

Of those who go past 5 years, there’s no guarantee they will survive the next 5 years.

So what are the common problems suffered by small businesses…

  • The owners work too hard and for too many hours.
  • Personal objectives of the owners such as hobbies and spending time with their family end up low down on the list of priorities.
  • The owners spend too much time doing the day-to-day technical work rather than planning and managing the business.
  • The owners don’t know where their business is going.
  • The owners don’t understand that in order for a business to have a good sale value it must work without them.
  • Many owners get frustrated and simply give up and go back to being an employee.
  • The rewards don’t match the effort.

They often face common problems in managing their business…

  • No consistency in delivery of their product.
  • Can’t depend on their employees to get it right.
  • They focus on people rather than systems, which creates problems when the people leave.
  • Systems that are in place are not documented but in the head of the person who leaves.
  • The owner ends up doing everything.
  • Employees are not as diligent as the owners.
  • The owner spends too much time filled up with other people’s problems and administration.
  • The owner always has to supervise and guide employees.
  • They have no idea how they compare with other similar businesses and competitors with respect to financial performance or non-financial areas such as human recourses, production, marketing, etc. They therefore don’t know where there are areas for improvement.

With regards to marketing these are common problems for small businesses…

  • It’s done ad hoc rather than in a systematised way.
  • They don’t know what works.
  • They don’t fully understand why their customers buy.
  • They don’t know who their most profitable customers are.
  • They don’t measure their marketing results against costs.
  • They take on customers they later regret dealing with.
  • Bad debt problems.

Then there are the dreaded financial problems…

  • Relying on short-term overdrafts to try to support long-term growth.
  • Over relying on the bank due to over trading.
  • No system for projecting income and expenditure.
  • No system for measuring key financial indicators against their plan.
  • Accounts are not useful to the business.
  • Accounts are not produced quickly enough.

If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.

Accountants in Putney

Aug30

We are accountants in Putney.  To go straight to our Home page please click https://www.southsideaccountants.co.uk/index.html.

To see how we can help each other, just call us for an informal meeting on 020 8785 3314.  We never put any pressure on  clients to join us. The informal meeting would be over a drink discussing your business and looking at whether we would be a worthwhile investment for you– not much point otherwise.

Further even if you have signed on with us and we do not live up to your expectations, talk to us and even after this you feel dissatisfied – we will refund your fees without any quibbles.

We genuinely want to make sure you only take us on only if our fees will be a worthwhile investment. Otherwise we will part company with a handshake and a smile – no hard feelings.

The following links give key information about us.

 

If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.

Follow The Success Formula

Aug30

I think these are great points to work towards making your small business a success

  • Believe you can.
  • Create the right environment at home and at work.
  • Enjoy yourself.
  • Expose yourself to what’s new and keep learning.
  • Plan what you’re going to do.
  • Stick at it.
  • Be willing to take risks.
  • Take responsibility for your actions.
  • Take action – follow Nike’s “just do it” slogan.

 

If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon and London.

Your Personal Objectives – Small Business

Aug27

If your business doesn’t meet your personal objectives you’ve not really succeeded. Your business may be a success, made lots of money, have many stores, etc but if that doesn’t deliver what you personally want from life, what’s the point? You’ve now really made a loss rather than a profit from your life.

Start by imagining your own funeral and what you would like to say to all your friends, colleagues and acquaintances about your life, once it’s too late to now do anything about it.

  • What would you like your life story to be?
  • What would you like to have achieved?
  • What would you like your life to have been like?
  • What battles would you like to have won?
  • What moral values would you like to have lived up to?

Only when you answer these types of questions can you move onto your business and develop that to fulfil your personal objectives.

It may be that you stop there. If a business isn’t going to be the thing that helped you fulfil your life’s ambitions. Better to sort this out up front, than waste precious time going down the wrong road.

Particularly with businesses owned by more than one person, it’s important that each individual owners’ personal objectives can be met by the same business. For example, do you know when your partner wants to exit the business and does this work for your business strategy. If individual goals can’t be met by the same business, it’s time to think again.

You need an open and honest discussion of each other’s personal goals to identify any problem areas at this stage and to then identify a business strategy to deliver those goals for all.

It’s important the business serves the owner, so personal goals must come first.

Here are some questions to answer personally to get you going…

  • Are you happy with what you do in the business?
  • If not, how would you like to change what you do?
  • Do you have a planned retirement date and exit routes and what are they?
  • Do you spend enough time away from the business?
  • Is there anything you would particularly like to do, success trappings you would like or experiences to have over the next 5 years?
  • What don’t you want in your life?
  • What do you want out of life?
  • What are the most important things for you and what gets in the way?
  • What income do you want in each of the next 5 years?

View our Bookkeeping system video

If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.

Southside Accountants – Mitcham Branch

Aug22

We are pleased to announce that on 23 Auguust 2010, Southside Accountants Accounting Services in London is opening a branch in Mitcham .  The address for the Mitcham branch is as follows:

The Generator Business Centre

95 Miles Road

Mitcham
Surrey
CR4 3FH

The telephone number is 020 8408 1574

Please come over to say hello and enjoy our tea/coffee. If you bring a smile with you we will even through in some biscuits!

 

Accounting Services in London

 

 

If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.

Mistakes and Learning from Others

Aug21

Don’t Worry About Mistakes

Everybody makes mistakes. Don’t listen to those who say you’ll learn from them. May be you will, may be you won’t. After all, Henry Ford went bankrupt twice before becoming a success.

Don’t worry about making mistakes if you want to succeed in business. You need to decide for yourself if you can live with failure knowing you tried your best. Is that not better than not to have tried at all? Many successful entrepreneurs believe it’s better to have tried and failed than never have had the courage to try.

You need to take action and get started. Sure, you don’t know everything but don’t wait forever planning or you’ll do nothing.

If you don’t know about taxes, so what? There’s no tax to worry about until you start making some money anyway.

And don’t beat a dead horse. Recognise when something is not going to work, cut your losses and move on. There’s no rule about you can only start one business in your lifetime. You have 365 new chances every year to accomplish your goals.

Read And Learn From Others.

The most successful people have an insatiable need to know more, rather than defending what they already know. Read books, magazines, learn from others and continue to move forward. Try to learn something new everyday.

You can learn a lot from what other businesses are doing, especially those that are not in your industry. What ideas can you take from totally different types of businesses and apply them to yours. In sales, manufacturers tend to have used a field sales force, retailers use adverts and professional services use referrals but think how much more successful they could all be if they added methods from other businesses. Use the principle of duality by looking at other businesses. That’s what we’re doing in this report.

Fed Ex copied the banks method of clearing cheques overnight to develop an overnight package delivery service.

There was a double-glazing firm who offered free window installation if you signed up to have your windows fitted before the World Cup started and England happened to win. A firm of accountants copied the concept but applied it to accountancy services, adding the bonus that if Scotland won, it was free accountancy services for life – a totally risk free offer! In reality they placed a bet at the bookies to cover themselves and this was their marketing cost. This beat their conventional marketing offers many times over.

So look and learn from others. Adapt and adopt what you read here as makes sense to you.

If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.

Inheritance Tax Basics

Aug9

Give It Away And Live For 7 Years

No inheritance tax is payable on most gifts in your lifetime so long as you live 7 years after the gift. These gifts are known as a Potentially Exempt Transfers (PET)

If a gift is made but there is some reservation on it, such as gifting your house with the understanding you can still live there until you die, this will not count as a PET and will still form part of your estate that is subject to IHT on at death. However, the gift will be effective for capital gains tax, which can create a double tax charge for the person a that inherits the house.

If you give away cash that is used to purchase your house, you can be liable to income tax on the benefit of living in the house. This is called the pre-owned asset charge.

There is a sliding for scale for the amount of IHT payable for death within the 7 years.

Of course if your estate is worth less than £325,000, no IHT is ever payable.

 

 

Other Gifts That Are Always Free Of Inheritance Tax

The following will always be free on IHT, whenever they are made…

  • Small gifts to the same person of not more than £250 in a year.
  • Gifts in consideration of marriage of £5,000 from parents, £2,500 from grandparents and £1,000 from anyone else.
  • Normal expenditure out of income where the amounts given are part of your normal expenditure taking one year with another.
  • Amounts up to £3,000, with any unused amount being allowed to be carried forward to the following tax year.
  • Any gifts between spouses/civil partners, where the person who receives the gift is domiciled in the UK.
  • Any gifts to charities or political parties.

If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.