Having a clear business strategy and a simple plan to deliver it sounds obvious. Its amazing how many businesses, even mature ones, actually don’t have either. Busy with the day job, lost in the detail, it’s a commonly neglected areas for many businesses. And yet it doesn’t have to be complex or difficult. A professional coach will help you improve efficiency, creating time for you to work on where your business should be going. Building a simple but effect strategy will transform your results and your future.

Having properly prepared business plans, and being able to present them effectively is fundamental to every business. In meeting with the bank, potential investors or any external stake-holder it’s critical for credibility that there is clear, well thought out and professionally presented business plan.

Having a written plan is also one of the first steps to creating accountability in any business.

Securing funding and getting the right investors for your business is hugely important and could be key to your success. Understanding the different kinds of funding available is important. Knowing how investors think, and what’s important to them is critical knowledge. Being investor ready with your strategy and plan well prepared will greatly increase your chances of achieving this.

Most people would think of rapid growth as a “high class problem” but if it’s not properly planned for it could be the rock on which you perish. Rapid growth often brings huge operational and financial challenges to a business. Understanding these in advance and having a well thought through plan will help you avoid letting your customers down, or even having a financial disaster.

We all know the old saying – CASH IS KING. Most business that fail, do so because they run out of cash. Being able to produce accurate financial forecasts is critical from day one. Understanding cash flow and the factors that influence it is absolutely fundamental to survival. Understanding the things you need to be on top of and how to maintain the right level of visibility is key in every business.

We’ve heard it so many times – “if we just had more sales.” Sales create the cash and so is the life blood of every business. Building successful sales strategies to ensure not only the right volume of sales but also the right quality is really important. Building high quality “margin mix” is key to every good business. Having the right mix of markets, sectors, customers and products is all highly important in having a well balanced and sustainable business.

Getting the operation ticking over like a well oiled machine never seems easy to achieve. Building the right operational dashboard and having visibility of the key activities is key to any operation. With good visibility, it’s much easier to implement good performance management and drive a well performing operation.

Efficiency and lean are often associated with manufacturing but every business can learn to do it. Everything we do in business is either adding cost, or adding value. Lean is quite simply the removal of non value add activity and can be applied to every function across any business. Learning to recognise and remove activity that’s not value adding can release amazing amounts of time and resource that can be re-focused on other things and save money.