When you’re an entrepreneur, there are a million things to keep track of, from your cash flow to your accountant’s billable hours. Figuring out if the company is moving in the right direction—and how to get it back on track when things go off course—can be tricky.
If you’re struggling with keeping tabs on all the moving pieces of your business, here’s some good news: There is a fix for that. In fact, there are a lot of fixes for that! The Book Fix This Next is a collection of tools and tricks that will help you streamline your business processes and keep tabs on what’s going on at any given time.
So get ready to start fixing this next so you can focus on growing your company in the future.
Weekly Meetings
If you’re not already having weekly meetings with your team, you should seriously consider starting them up. Sure, they may not be the most exciting thing to look forward to each week, but they’re an excellent way to stay on the same page with your employees and get a handle on the overall health of your company. A lot of times, businesses operate as a series of islands.
Different departments will do their own thing, and no one really has a grasp on the big picture. Weekly meetings create a bridge between these islands, allowing you to get a better sense of how your company is doing as a whole. What should you discuss during your meetings? Anything that you think is important to your company.
The beauty of weekly meetings is that you can discuss anything you want. Here are some topics that are worth discussing regularly:
Runway Tracker
Your runway refers to how long your business can survive before you run out of cash. Figuring out your runway is critical to your survival as an entrepreneur. For most businesses, it’s not enough to know how much cash you have in the bank.
You also need to know when that cash will run out so you can make sure you have enough money saved up to make it to payday. If you don’t keep tabs on your cash flow, it’s easy to lose track of when your money will run out.
The last thing you want is to find out you’re running low on funds when payroll is due but there’s no money left to pay people.
KPI Tracker
In business, key performance indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that you use to measure the health of your company. It’s important to track a variety of KPIs, including things like your customer acquisition rate, your customer retention rate, your profit margin, and your employee retention rate.
All these metrics are important, but the only way to make sure you’re on top of them is to create a system for tracking them. You can do this with a spreadsheet, but it’s more effective to do it digitally with a spreadsheet you can access from anywhere.
If you have a central database where you can log your KPIs, it will be much easier to spot trends and dig into nitty-gritty details. Plus, it will make it easier to share data with your employees.
Group Meetings
If you have a large team, consider setting up regular group meetings for your employees to attend. It doesn’t have to be anything formal; you can just invite your employees to a Zoom call or Google Hangout. Regular group meetings are a great way to keep your team on the same page.
When everyone can get on a call together, you can dive into more in-depth discussions about metrics and performance that you might not want to get into at a more superficial level during weekly meetings.
Process Map
If you want to be more effective at what you do, you need to find ways to streamline your business processes. The only question is how to do it. Employees get really used to doing things a certain way, so it can be really difficult to implement changes to processes that people have been doing for years.
One way to ease this transition is to create a process map. Process maps are visual representations of your company’s current processes. They make it easier to spot inefficiencies and brainstorm ways to streamline things.
Helping Hands
Business is a constant balancing act. You’re constantly trying to improve your metrics while also keeping an eye on your cash flow. At the same time, you have to make sure that your customers are happy, your employees are treated well, and your bills get paid on time.
It can be exhausting. At some point in your entrepreneurial journey, you’re going to feel like you’re about to break. That’s when you need to get help. Sometimes you just need someone to hold the weight for a bit so you can catch your breath. There are a few ways you can get assistance:
Conclusion
If you keep tabs on how your company is doing, it will be much easier to stay on track and move in the right direction. As the saying goes, “what gets measured gets done.” What gets measured gets done. Click To Tweet That’s why it’s so important to keep tabs on your key metrics, understand your company’s runway, and track your KPIs.
If you don’t do this, you’ll be flying blind, and your business will likely run into some serious trouble. That’s why it’s so important to fix this next by keeping tabs on your company’s performance.
The only way to do that is to make sure you’re tracking your KPIs and keeping tabs on your runway. Get in touch with us to learn how applying these principles can help you grow your business faster.
