Maturity - Considering your options

To get to the next level you need to engage in some strategic planning. This involves looking at what opportunities are currently in the market and assessing which are feasible and worth exploring. If an opportunity is worth exploring, you then need to look at how you go about doing so.

You also need to consider possible threats and think about how you can protect yourself from them. Look at what could go wrong, as well as how you can monitor performance to ensure those threats are minimised. 

When your business matures and you’re seriously looking at growth and the future, you need to be forecasting beyond 12 months.

At this stage, you should be looking further ahead to where the business is going by doing three to five year forecasts. This forecasting should not only involve looking at profitability and cashflow, but also projecting what your potential balance sheet or net wealth looks like.

An advisory board is similar to a board of directors at a public company level. It’s recommended for small to medium-sized privately owned business.

It’s generally made up of two to five individuals with different skills and backgrounds. However, all should have similar values to you and understand what you’re about and what you’re trying to achieve. 

By meeting with your advisory board on a regular basis (typically monthly or quarterly) you can get valuable input that can help you make the right decisions when it comes to new business opportunities and general operational matters.

Put simply, a business merger means combining two separate businesses into one. It provides both with a great opportunity for growth due to additional resources such as staff. It can also act as a succession plan if one takes over the other in time.

One big downside is the potential for a possible personality/cultural/value clash between the two businesses that can lead to failure. To avoid this, the culture and people in each business, and their feasibility to come together, should be carefully considered. 

The short answer is yes.

There are definitely cases where certain projects can be considered but it quickly becomes obvious they are not worthwhile pursuing. However, if initial investigations are positive, conducting project feasibility – both financial and personal – is certainly recommended to avoid a bad business decision and its implications.

A ‘what if’ scenario, otherwise known as a sensitivity analysis, is simply asking what if x happens, what if y happens, what if z happens? This can also form part of the project feasibility process.

When you look at the financial projections of any project from a profitability and cashflow perspective, it can be interesting to consider some ‘what if’ scenarios to figure out what the financial impact of small changes to the business would be. In a lot of cases, small changes in efficiency and productivity can lead to significantly greater profitability.