New Year, New Strategy: How to build up a Better Business

With the New Year comes new strategies and opportunities to build your business. If these strategies weren't already incorporated into your list of New Year's resolutions, consider following these recommendations to rejuvenate and keep your busy healthy in 2016.

Devise a Realistic Budget
Owning a business entails more than just producing and delivering products and services. It requires careful management of resources that are necessary to run those operations. Through careful planning of an outline that showcases anticipated revenues and associated business expenses, potential problems can be identified and rectified before they develop into real issues. At the beginning of the year, create a budget that spans the entire twelve months. Revisit this budget monthly to update and adjust sales forecasts and expenses. 

Evaluate Employee Compensation
Setting salaries for employees is one of the largest expenses a business incurs and is nothing less than a balancing act. It requires competitive compensation packages for retainment of the top talent. Salaries often become an issue due to perceived inequity among employees. Various sites can be a huge resource when determining what a salary should be including salary.com, payscale.com, and simple searches on the internet. This shows the demographic breakdown according to the region and size of the market. Look at the local market in your area as well. The trends here are often more important to your employees.

Examine Buy-Sell Agreements
This is an important aspect of your business’ financial future. While business owners generally don't like to think about potential negative outcomes, the agreement should cover the most plausible events that may impact the future of the company. Topics such as death, disability, voluntary departure, forced departure, loss of a major customer, and lack of cash flow should all be visited and verified with your legal and accounting team. A wait-and-see approach is not an option. 

Determine Your Business' Worth
If a business valuation has not been conducted in the past few years, now is a good time to complete this process. When laying out the value of the business, you can make better decisions related to personal investment strategies and business succession plans. If the value is not what you expected, turn your focus toward the drivers that are in your control including establishing a management team. Through determining the value of your business, you can estimate potential tax liability that will incur during the sale or transfer of the company.

A fresh start to the New Year is a chance to make a fresh start in your company as well. Make sure you follow the above tips to get the ground laid for further improvements. You can also consult with professionals like X Plane to help organize and accelerate the results of a new strategy. In no time you’ll be able to create a plan for better profits and increased sales.