1. Take control of your cash flow management – Ensure invoices are raised in a timely manner, issue statements and reminder letters, ensure all terms of trade are clearly communicated, produce a cash flow plan, talk terms with your suppliers.
2. Revise your funding arrangements – Spend some time to revise your funding requirements and if the current arrangement isn’t suitable speak to your lender about more favourable terms and consider alternative funding methods like Crowdfunding and Invoice Financing.
3. Tackle the clutter – Eliminate everything that no longer has a practical purpose. As a rule of thumb, throw it away if you haven’t looked at it in the past year.
4. Get filing – if your office is full of paperwork and collapsing shelves, sort out your filing system. Make sure that you only file essential information such as purchase and sales invoices, bank statements and important customer data as 80 per cent of all filed papers are never read again.
5. Risk Management – Do you have a formal Risk Management process! In today’s challenging times protecting the business from loss is critical and insuring the debtor’s ledger with Credit Insurance is worth implementing.
6. Work smarter – meticulous planning is the key to business success. Ensure that you review your business objectives and prioritize everything that you want to achieve by December. Developing a key action plan will help.
7. Stock matters – don’t get yourself into an over-stocked position where all your money is tied up in goods that you may not necessarily be able to sell. Review your stock levels carefully and look back at the last 18 months sales figures to determine seasonal peaks and troughs.
8. Harness people power – review your staffing levels for the next 6 months and plan to cover staff holidays or peak season demand. If there are any significant skills gaps within your workforce that is holding your business back, consider external training courses to boost the skills of your existing staff and the hiring of specialist skilled Temp Staff to add at peak times and when needed.
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