Financial Advice

Do you have a plan? Pull it together in 5 step..

2023 seems to have got off to a roaring start, particularly now everyone is back from the beach. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the first quarter goes!

At this time of year, we like to bed in our plans for the next financial year. While we know we won’t stick to them to the letter, setting our overall goals, quarterly targets and our annual budgets gives us a good basis for the year.

We do this in a series of steps:

We start by reviewing our business plan – this is given a good review every three years, and in between, it gets a yearly dust-off to make sure we still want to achieve the same things and how we are going.
Then we pull together the plan for the year. This fits on one A3 piece of paper, with one big goal for the year. We then identify the three things we need to achieve to reach that goal with specific targets – for example, how many new clients we are looking for and what are they like.
What are we going to achieve in the first quarter? On that same piece of paper, we identify the first quarter goals – 90 days of action. How will we know we are on track? What do we need to do to hit the ground running?
Put together the budget – as accountants, we know that it is the numbers that tell us how we are doing – and when we are off track. We have a clear development plan, so putting them into a budget enables us to identify where our costs are going to increase and how we will fund our growth.
A marketing plan – the key to driving growth. Finally, we identify our annual marketing plan and a detailed plan for the next 90 days, what events we are running and where will we advertise. What do we want to achieve from each campaign and how will we measure it?

We are fortunate to have a lot of wall space and whiteboards in our offices so this is a very visual process. As we get into the more detailed planning we get key team members involved.