Have you ever thought of giving your company a physical? There are 20 things I will be going over in today’s podcast that you need to consider when reviewing your company before going into the next year. Before anything, make sure you are giving your company an evaluation!
Company Physical
We’re gonna give your company an annual physical. This could be really good or really bad.
I have a friend who’s son just joined the Army and kind of described what that physical was like…and let’s just say they do not leave any crevice unchecked.
You need to think the same way for your business and be hyper alert to a few things. At the end of the year you need to look at what your business has done over the previous year and give it a company physical.
So I’m going to go through the 20 things to consider when reviewing your company before going into the next year. Now, each company is different and I’m going to go over the 20 things that applies to my companies. Every industry has different questions but I believe this will guide you through the heart of what I’m trying to get through.
- Is our revenue increasing or decreasing? Do you know why?
- Do we still have a competitive advantage? You should be able to say we do this better than our competitors or this is what differentiates us.
- Is there new competition? Analyze and assess.
- What is your greatest threat to survival? What’s the one thing that you fear that if it happened it would be a tremendous threat to your business?
- Is our customer base growing or declining? Do you know why?
- Are our traffic estimate requests, calls, visits, et cetera increasing or decreasing? We want to see if more people are wanting to do business with us this year or in the year or is it in decline.
- What new opportunities are profit streams should we consider? Which profit streams are we not taking advantage of? I try to grow every one of my companies at 20% a year. I try to constantly add a new stream of profit every year because what worked 5 years ago may not be working right now.
- How is your balance sheet? How does your cash reserves look? How about your debt?
- Where are your staff weaknesses? Where are your deficiencies within your staff?
- What investments in infrastructure do you need to make? Do you need software updates or just new software in general? You don’t want to look like a rundown company. Uniforms, signage, vehicles, etc.
- Which systems do you need to improve? Your delivery, your customer service, your manufacturing/ These are the things that you repetitively do. Are they as fast as they should be and can they be improved?
- What 1-3 things did we do well this past year? What worked?
- What 1-3 things did we do that we need to improve on? What didn’t work?
- What is our core business and are we still pursuing it? In this podcast we talked about how companies get away from their core business and go into decline.
- What is distracting us? What is the shiny object that is taking our time and effort away from the core business?
- Where are you leaking money? I’m fanatical about this every year. I actually do it every quarter but really at the end of the year I really start looking at everything.
- Where can we save money and how much can we save?
- Do we need more or better leadership and where? Did we develop more leadership this year or did it weaken?
- What one change would make the biggest difference in your business? Cutting costs, increasing ad spend, infrastructure changes, etc.
- Can you see where your industry is moving and are you prepared for it? You’ve got to start looking into the future. You’ve got to be hyper alert to threats.
Photography Credits
“balance sheet ok” By Philppe Put
Feature image under Creative Commons License Attributions-NoDerivs 2.0
