Business foundations

Successful businesses are built on firm foundations, a central theme of our spring/summer monthly Business Club meetings - making sure that you know your destination and have a detailed roadmap to reach it.

A vision and a business roadmap

Premier Account's monthly business club opens its spring 2018 series of meetings very soon in Manchester as an interactive networking event with a very structured but enjoyable core.

Vision, planning and good bookkeeping are three of the first essential cornerstones.

Knowing exactly where you and your company are going is vital to sound decision-making throughout the full life-cycle of your own particular business journey. This may move on from being a sole-trader to incorporation, expansion, floatation, mergers and acquisitions, succession planning, preparing for sale, retirement, and eventually life's greater ambitions.

Strategic plan

Strategic planning is vital to organising and managing a successful business. Most people have a good idea of their goals. Surprisingly few really know how to achieve them.

To put flesh on the bones of your ambitions, your business needs a strategic plan. This allows you to break realistic goals down into practical three-year, one-year and quarterly schedules linked to tangible aims.

Why this important early on? You will probably reap the longer-term advantage at times when you are forced to respond to market changes and other unforeseen circumstances. A sound plan helps you to adapt quickly and confidently to firm objectives. Planning during the good times helps you to maintain business momentum during the more difficult times.

Sound bookkeeping

Good bookkeeping is about systems and data, the lifeblood running through all your business activities. Bookkeeping technology is evolving quickly. But underlying core principles remain the same. Businesses need robust, practical systems to track money transactions in and out and keep a firm grip on their finances.

There are two other important reason why good bookkeeping is central to the business club agenda. Firstly, it provides an accurate timeline recording how your business vision is shaping up and performing in practice; HMRC also expects you to keep good records.

Secondly, financial information is central to flexible business planning, expansion, access to finance data and employee responsibilities. By using cloud bookkeeping based on Xero, you can upload live daily business information as it happens through your mobile phone or device -and access the results.

Our Xero Training Workshop will show how this can give you near-instantaneous precise financial knowledge and insights to manage and guide your business from the luxury of your own armchair!

Employing staff

The Business Club will also look closely at other live commercial issues for small companies: -

Employing people is a major step. When your first member of staff is appointed, your business takes on legally-binding responsibilities for employee rights, pay, benefits and new workplace pension provisions - auto enrolment.

Branding - being know for the right reasons

Successful businesses often create a distinctive competitive-edge. But you need to explain to customers what your strengths are. Branding summarises your benefits and values so that they are easy to recognise instantly again and again. We will look at this in detail.

Pricing - don't undersell yourself

Are you using the right pricing strategy? For example, a tiered-system allows you to offer a reasonable price which suits many customers, but also a premium price with additional benefits that will attract a percentage of customers willing to pay more for an enhanced service or product.

At the same time, you can offer a bargain-basement price to corner another part of the market. Business consultants and advisors, McKinsey & Company, say that even a 1% increase in your prices can lead to a profit improvement of 11%.

Further thoughts?

The above list is by no means exclusive; we will be covering many other topics during our spring and summer meetings, including additional issues that you might want to raise.