Articles

There are some very good government programmes in place for helping small businesses to grow, however, if not followed through properly; they can leave the business owner(s) with a list of things to do without fully understanding how to do them or even, after a while, wondering if they are still relevant.

We have recently been speaking to a number of owners of companies who have spent time, effort, and money on programmes of work that have helped them to understand their business and the direction that they want their business to take.

They have been left with their action plans and tasks to take them there. However, because the programme has ended, there is no-one to help them to progress the action plans and no help to take them on the journey that they had planned.

Business Growth Programme Focus

Stepping back from the chaos of the everyday issues that [small] businesses endure is one of the most difficult and challenging steps that owner managers have to make; and it is so easy to get sucked back into this tactical management.

With the choice of keeping a customer happy or progressing with [say] a ‘marketing plan’, the majority of business owners will go for keeping the customer happy as the priority. With more of these choices arising, slowly but surely, the owner, unless highly self-disciplined, can get sucked back in to the state of operational chaos from where he came before the programme.

With the programme complete, the business owner can feel compelled into taking the derived set of actions. However, they may be no longer appropriate and over time will need reviewing. With no-one there to help ratify the way forward, the priorities can slowly revert to tackling the operational issues. Unfortunately the investment in the programme becomes lost and even worse the business owner may well be reluctant to try and take those necessary growth steps again as they will have lost confidence…

Business Growth Programme Reviews

A longer term approach, following the completed busimess growth programme, which imstills some regular [monthly] reviews with the business owner (reviewing management accounts, cash flow, working capital, sales pipeline, orders, marketing, resources etc.) and re-enforces or tweaks the actions and priorities, can ensure that there is a good return on investment.

If this feels familiar and you would like discuss the working approach please contact CMC via the form below.