With a new year comes new opportunities to change how your business operates and get serious about growth.
It’s no small task and, as the owner of a business myself, trust me when I say I know thinking about growth can sometimes leave you wanting to tear your hair out.
But it doesn’t have to be a difficult or stressful job, so have a read of our tips to grow your business.
Planning and forecasting
Any period of expansion needs to be meticulously planned in as much detail as possible.
You probably made a business plan when you first started out, but what’s important this time is that you need to set yourself different, specific indicators of success to ensure you keep focus during your growth period.
Typically, businesses set themselves financial goals, but be more specific than just that. Do extra hires form part of your vision? Perhaps a new location or new service does.
You must also take into account financial forecasts before expanding. After all, you’re potentially going to be investing a lot of money into business assets.
One challenge is making sure you retain a positive cashflow during your expansion, so you don’t fall behind with loan or rent payments.
A cashflow forecast is essential for this, which you can either complete yourself or hire an accountant to assist you with.
Funding
If you can’t maintain a positive cashflow right now, there’s no need to postpone or even cancel your growth plans – external funding could be a good option for you.
There are a lot of options out there for you to research thoroughly, and many schemes are designed for people with specific goals.
For instance, asset finance could be a cost-effective way to fund purchases and spread the cost of equipment over its economic life.
Invoice finance, on the other hand, involves a lender helping you to leverage your unpaid invoices by giving your business an instant cash injection of up to 95% of the outstanding amount.
Of course, you could go for a standard bank loan or a Government-backed programme, like the recovery loan scheme, although you have to prove your business was adversely affected by COVID-19 to claim this.
Whichever path you go down, preparation is always going to give you the best chance for success, no matter how good your talk might be.
Business plans, financial and cashflow forecasts and even an accountant’s backing can only improve your funding bid.
Talk to an accountant
Now, I’m not just trying to sell my team here, but hiring an accountant is one of the best ways to grow your business.
Not only can we help you with some of the things we’ve talked about, such as business plans, forecasts and funding applications, we can also help you steer your business during its growth period.
One way we do this is by producing monthly and quarterly management accounts, which detail your finances and performance in an easy-to-understand way.
They also allow us to review your growth so we can nudge you back on path if something isn’t quite right or if a new opportunity presents itself.
Meanwhile, we’ll make sure your taxes are as efficient as possible by offsetting every business expense against your tax bill and claiming every credit and relief scheme available to you.
The extra money you save can then be reinvested back into your business, or just used to reward yourself for overseeing a successful growth period.
Talk to us about your business growth plan.