Businesses often run unprofitably for years. This programme shows you how to get and use your business data.

It’s hard to run a profitable business because it means weighing the highly desirable costs of staff, promotion, research, capital investment and inventory against the price the market is prepared to pay for your product or service. It’s a balancing act, perhaps the most difficult people are called on to make.

Surgeons have to decide daily between life-threatening diseases and life-threatening operations. Car drivers decide momentarily between getting to their destination sooner and avoiding a crash. Airline pilots decide on each flight between courses of action that might endanger their passengers’ lives and the risk of incurring the wrath of delayed customers.

The professionals have highly skilled technical backup to guide their decisions, because lives are at risk. The individual, like the car driver and the business man, doesn’t have such backup; he makes his decisions largely alone. The risks he inevitably takes will sometimes end up as a problem. When they do, it’s his problem, nobody else’s.

Making the best (but not always the right) decisions requires that you know which are the critical issues in your business. When I ran a business with four thousand products and services through eighteen operations across the Pacific Rim I worked out that the sales figures for five of those products or services at the end of the first week of the month could predict with astonishing accuracy the profits for the whole business for the entire month. Knowing my short-term cash flow gave me a huge advantage by helping me with tactical, opportunistic decisions.

However, the main strategic decisions, just as in a major crime investigation, required consistent, relevant data - though, as I discovered, not nearly as much of it as the data-providers would have liked me to have.

There are six stages to making your business profitable.

STAGE 1. Knowing exactly what your cash flow is - all the time.
Control of cash is the single most important aspect of an organisation’s management.

STAGE 2. Knowing which products or services make the money.
That doesn’t mean that you kill those that don’t; they will be contributing to the overheads of the business. If you kill them, heavier overheads will accrue to the remaining products some of which will then appear to be unprofitable. Follow that route and you will end up with no products at all.

STAGE 3. Learning the market potential for those products.
You may not have access to sophisticated research data but you have two ears, the best research tools of all. Ask and you shall learn about the market in which you are operating.

STAGE 4. Calculating your investment pot.
You need cash to invest in promotions, in staff, in advertising. How much can you call on if you really need to? Being undercapitalised is the biggest single cause of business failure. You may need to extend your investment pot. How would you do that?

STAGE 5. Controlling your costs.
Do not be misled into thinking that this is merely a matter of saying NO to all expenditure or of fighting for the last discount on everything you buy. The sensible cost cutter knows what matters and what doesn’t. Cutting essential costs damages the business. Keep your cost cutting to those things which the business does not immediately and urgently need.

STAGE 6. Controlling your (and your staff’s) use of time.
The emails on the screen today are not necessarily the ones that matter. Pay attention only to what is going to contribute to the four stages above. Leave the rest until you have time to deal with it. Great success is achieved by disciplined, shrewd prioritization.

This programme takes your business data input and guides you to the right decisions on all the above stages. It is a powerful on-line consultative process that uses the minimum of time and produces the maximum of sound advice.

How much does it cost? That depends on the size and complexity of the business.

Get your priorities right and profits will follow

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