I believe that better profitability is an overlooked tool for improving a business owner’s life. Higher profits allow people to send their kids to better schools, take better vacations, and save more for retirement. Profits also produce the cash needed to make better investments in the business and higher pay for the employees.
It’s nice to say that you are for more profits, but just how do you make that happen? I have found three major approaches to achieving higher profitability:
· Have a written business plan that is reviewed and updated regularly
· Invest in your pricing system
· Control your overhead costs through better processes
Writing a business plan forces you to do the critical thinking. Conflicting goals become more obvious. The reality that you don’t really understand your own strengths and weaknesses suddenly becomes clear. Addressing these problems in your planning is what makes it more likely that good decision making will result.
A typical business owner hates to have a prospect reject a quote and as a result we tend to leave a lot of money on the table. A good pricing system will allow you to constantly experiment with how you present the value of your service or product to get that higher sales dollar. Increasing your sales prices by just a few percentage points can often double your net profits.
It took me a lot of years to discover the key to controlling overhead costs. Controlling the processes that consume the overhead is the only thing that works. Rather than demanding that a company save money by buying fewer paperclips, change the processes so that fewer paperclips are required.