Tag: strategic planning

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Compliance alone won’t grow your business

Good compliance is essential. It keeps you legal. But it is always looking backwards and does little to help a business to grow. Many accountants only do once a year accounts and many business owners are happy with this.

Real growth comes through planning, looking forward, and taking actions.

To help with this we run FOUR strategic planning days Jan – Mar (2 for accountants and 2 for other business owners) and another in the Autumn.

But we don’t just run them for other people. My year end is July, a legacy from when my life and business revolved around my young children and the school year. I work through the same SPD myself every Summer to work out my priorities and plans each year.

We look at:

  • Personal goals
  • Business goals
  • Your offer
  • Your competitors
  • Your ideal client
  • Your positioning and USP
  • SWOT analysis
  • Goals
  • Blockers
  • Actions

Yes, I know that covers more than strategy but, for small businesses, it’s enough to have a clear plan and we have clients who come back to repeat the exercise with us.

When did you last look at your own business in this way?

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Pricing for the hassle factor

I’ve just received an email from my web hosting company to say that they will be charging me more.

The reason is that two of my websites use software that is about to become obsolete so the hosting company will charge me an extra support fee from 5 February unless I upgrade.

This software has a two year life so I’ve already upgraded it once with the help of the hosting company (Fasthosts provide much better support for the tiny monthly fee that I pay them and they’re lovely to deal with). It’s not too difficult but I imagine that many people just ignore a simple message that their site will be unsupported. This way I have a financial incentive to make sure that I do the upgrade promptly. And, if I don’t, the hosting company get some extra income as they’d probably end up sorting out the mess anyway.

Which reminded me that, although Minerva Accountants is supposed to be a Xero only business, we do have one client using an older cloud bookkeeping software with less functionality. This means that we’re unable to offer as good a service. Of course I justified it to myself at the time but now, with the benefit of hindsight, I realise that I was wrong and should have followed my own advice! So I’m going to offer to help my client to migrate to Xero for a better service or to increase the fee to support an ageing app.

Where have you broken your own rules and regretted the lack of efficiency? Should you correct this even if it means losing the client?

How about joining one of our strategic planning days to streamline your business for 2023?

This year we’re running two (although you can join either one). Fri 27 January will be for any business and Wed 22 February will focus on accountants/bookkeepers. Find out more here.