Profit is a reliable measurement of a business’ success. Profits are the very lifeblood of a business. They fuel growth, support the owners, provide for the well being of the staff, and ultimately determine the success or failure of the business.

 So how can you maximise your profits?

Gross profit:

One objective is either to expand sales income while controlling direct costs, or reduce direct costs to increase gross profit.

You must ensure that:

• You know your market and your competitors;

• Your product knowledge is complete and you are technically able in all aspects of the business;

• Your service is of high quality, delivered on time and according to specification;

• You take advantage of cost-effective means to increase sales

• Your direct costs are kept to an absolute minimum. Most businesses should aim to reduce direct costs every year.

 Overheads

You should also keep costs under your control:

Expenses – Keep your business expenses to an absolute minimum, and ensure that any additional overheads you assume result in increased profitability/efficiency;

 Increasing your overheads – Are you satisfied that for all new overheads; you have reviewed the market to establish where to place your orders? Reliability and backup service are important factors to take into account. The cheapest may not be the best for your business;

• Where assets are acquired on finance – Be sure to obtain quotations for your finance from your suppliers, your bank, and a finance company. Check with us to see if your finance costs could be reduced;

• Reviews – Many businesses could benefit from a regular review of their telephone and insurance costs. Even bank charges can often be reduced;

• Credit – Control your credit account customers closely to avoid bad debts.

  In summary:

You must be aware of your income and expenditure. Proper books and records are

essential for monitoring the trends and patterns in your business. It is not necessary to produce a full profit and loss account every month, rather select the key factors

that will best help you understand how you are doing, e.g. chargeable hours, sales volume, wastage, and materials used. Compare these figures with previous months, and with your targets.

 If you would like a Profit Improvement Day for your business, just call us on +353 (0)1 288 5563.

You know all the common excuses: the slowing economy, the government policies, the marketing clutter, the low customer confidence…

So forget the excuses and instead – Learn how to set yourself apart from your competition.

Ask yourself the 10 crucial “Questions of Profitability”. Then learn how to increase profits through your customers, suppliers, employees, and processes.

1. What do I want more of now?
2. Where and how am I going to find my number one key profitable client?
3. Am I busy or effective right now?
4. What three actions can I take right now to increase profitability?
5. What do I know I should be doing right now?
6. What does profitability mean to me?
7. What would make me more profitable?
8. Who can I get to help me?
9. Do I know someone who is extremely profitable that I can model?
10. How can I increase the number of customers?

Get the how-to’s and what-not-to’s about corporate survival in my eBook The Top 100 Tips for Business Turnaround

As professionals, time is our key asset. We want to be outstanding – not just in our mastery of time, but by providing excellent service to clients. Mastery of time helps us build an outstanding reputation – which means that clients come to us, saving us further marketing time and resource.

Do you feel you never have enough time to perform all the tasks involved in delivering on schedule for your clients? Then make the time with these simple tips…

1. Client satisfaction is your income. The success of your business depends on the strength of your client relationships. As it is not possible to build excellent relationships with absolutely everybody, it helps to explicitly prioritise relationships, not tasks. We are always saying ‘No’ to somebody – implicitly or explicitly.
2. Implement “focus time” when fee-earners can get on with work without interruption; even from you!
3. When estimating work, add a 20% contingency which can either be used to deal with unexpected time required – or to delight the client by exceeding expectations.
4. Carry a file of buffer tasks that can be done in the car, while waiting for a client, in a restaurant while waiting for service, at the airport or when appointments get cancelled.
5. Drastically reduce meeting times. It is possible to have a very effective meeting in 30 minutes. Most clients (unless they have travelled long distances) will be impressed with a professionally-run 30-60 minute meeting.
6. Make more use of scheduled telephone meetings, rather than seeing prospective clients up-front. Why travel to see a prospect that has made no commitment to use your services?
7. If a client requires a query answered immediately, ask them why – respectfully and politely. Perhaps their deadline is driven by misunderstanding; or perhaps you will come to a better understanding of their business pressures, that may in turn create new opportunities in that niche.

What else would you add to this list?

Is the recession getting you down? Is the constant endless stream of bad economic news giving you a negative attitude to your business and its survival? Then stop now and turn this challenge into an opportunity to re-evaluate your business and make it grow instead. 

1. Establish your business goals. Set long term (1-year, 5-year) and short term (daily, weekly, monthly) goals for every aspect of your business.
2. Plan how you will achieve each goal. Then make a back-up for each plan.
3. Connect with every single one of your clients; personally. Regardless of whether or not they’ve used your company or your services. It’s cheaper, easier, and more profitable to keep an existing client than it is to get a new one.
4. Make your clients successful. The more success they encounter because of what you provide them, the more successful you will be.
5. Make your suppliers successful. It’s far easier to ask for help from contractors or suppliers that you use, if you are doing your best to be fair and honest with them as well.
6. Challenge every expense, policy, and procedure. Remember, bureaucracy kills! If it’s not going to make things easier, make money or make sense, don’t do it!
7. Challenge your employees and co-workers. Set goals and deadlines that challenge the people who work for you and with you. Most of the time they’ll not only meet those challenges, they’ll exceed them!
8. Be different and think differently. To set yourself apart from your competitors requires thinking differently than they do. Not just thinking outside the box, but out of this world! Not just pushing the envelope, but shredding it to bits!
9. Get help. Don’t wall off success by being too stubborn or proud to get help. There are specialists, consultants, and coaches for almost every problem area you can think of. Look them up, seek them out, and put them to work with you.
10. Have fun. If it’s not fun, do something else.

 Learn more on:  http://ow.ly/9vf7W

Many companies right now are arranging their business development and strategic planning for the year ahead. But what will make taking this precious time out of your business a real success for you and make sure you get the outcomes you desire? Here’s ten things to take into account: 

1. Carefully select the members of your planning team.  Use two criteria for selection – first make sure you include those who can, and will, contribute positively to the content of your plan. Second, make sure you also include those who are positioned to drive the successful implementation of the strategies within the plan.
2. Involve employees beyond those on your planning team.  Ask them for help. Have them participate in pre-planning surveys to suggest issues for discussion at your up-coming strategy sessions. Be sure to offer them feedback on the outcome of those sessions. Remember, asking for their input implies a promise to provide feedback. If you forget that feedback, they’ll feel cheated.
3. Gather relevant information prior to your strategy session.  Have your planning team think through the issues you’re likely to discuss at your up-coming strategy session – and decide on the information they’ll need to make decisions. This analysis should cover economic forecasts, industry developments and marketplace trends, as well as a review of the competition. Formulate assumptions about the future and the impact these assumptions may have on your business.
4. Hold your strategy session away from your office.   Avoid the interruptions and distractions which so often arise during planning sessions. The meeting will be more effective in a comfortable place, free from interruptions and distractions. It’s best to get away from your business premises. Develop an agenda and appoint someone impartial to facilitate the discussion.
5. Educate your managers to the strategic planning process.  Make sure they all understand the definition, and the importance, of terms – like, “vision”, “mission” and “objective”, and make sure they all understand the critical role they play in both strategy development and strategy implementation.
6. Focus on Important Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This is one of the techniques Strategic Planners use to help businesses assess their external environments and internal capacity. In order to plan for the future, ask yourself such questions like…
   • Strengths: What are the advantages of your company and products? What do you do well? What do you have that your competitors don’t? What is it about your relationship with your customers that you can use to your advantage?
   • Weaknesses: Where is there room for improvement? Where does your company trip up? How would the marketplace describe your weaknesses? What does the competition have that you don’t?
   • Opportunities: What’s happening out there that you can capitalise on? What new, useful technologies are coming? What changes in buying or usage habits can be exploited?
   • Threats: What outside events or competitors are waiting to hit you when you’re not     looking? What potentially harmful regulations are on the horizon?
7. Define (or Redefine) the Company’s Vision and Mission. A business’s vision and mission statement (usually no more than one or two sentences) describes the purpose of the business. It enables all members to share the same view of the company’s goals, philosophy and future direction.
8. Build Consensus. A management team with a clear and consistent vision of where the company is headed is likely to be operating in tandem to reach their destination regardless of whatever situation is encountered. Getting buy-in from all the team players will go a long way toward ensuring the strategic plan’s success.
9. Communicate your strategy.  Once you’ve developed your strategic plan, let your employees know what it is. After all, it is they who will help with its implementation.
10. Remember that strategic planning is more than an event; it’s a process.  Once you’ve developed the plan, your work is just beginning. Implementation is where you’ll spend the bulk of your time and resources. Make sure you take that implementation seriously. Integrate your plan into the day-to-day operation of your business. Have your people develop specific actions/goals and timelines to implement your strategy. Monitor progress of those actions at your quarterly staff appraisal meetings. Remember, its one thing to develop a strategy, and quite another to implement it – map out an action plan!

Its right to expect the best from your staff, but do you know how to achieve this?  Try these ten top tips to show you how…..

1. Do it first. If you can tell your team that you’ve been there, done that; you have more credibility and will gain more respect for what you want.
2. Take the best of what you’ve done and improve it. After you’ve established your credibility, sort through the best of your experience and improve it to suit your current situation.
3. Be reasonable in your expectations. Remember that it took you a long time to get to your current expertise level, so be reasonable about what you expect others to accomplish for you.
4. Give direction and then back off. Let people do what they need to do. If you have a team, let them do their jobs, don’t micromanage every detail. Most people work best when they’re given autonomy.
5. Offer support on an as-needed basis. Let those you manage know that you’re there for support when the going gets tough, but don’t do their jobs for them.
6. Build in accountability. With leadership comes accountability and responsibility. Make sure people know that you expect them to ‘own up’ to what they have to do.
7. Be crystal clear about your goals. It’s amazing what people hear. Be definitive about where you want your team to go and the timeline for getting there. No one likes to flounder in a haze of unclear and ambiguous direction.
8. Reward in public, reprimand in private. You won’t gain respect for reprimanding someone in front of others. Remember, the ultimate responsibility is yours and if your people know that you back them up, they’ll go the extra mile for you.
9. Credit the team. If your department or team has been successful in meeting the goals, acknowledge them in open forums and public opportunities. Do this even when you know that one or two of the team members has not fully pulled their weight. You’ll gain their respect and they’ll be more willing to follow you the next time.
10. Be sensitive to unusual circumstances. No matter how much you’d like to think that the company or department comes first, people do have private lives and personal circumstances can affect their focus. Be sensitive within a reasonable period of time and then call them on it if they are not functioning up to par.

Author and business growth consultant Paul Davis and Senator Feargal Quinn

Senator Feargal Quinn launched my new business book EVOLVE in Dublin this week.  It’s taken nearly four years to get to the publication stage, so it was a day to celebrate for myself, my family and friends, and those I have worked alongside for many years.

Senator Quinn’s address to the launch was both inspiring and highly entertaining and he quoted numerous examples of leading business people who firmly stamp their own principles and beliefs onto their highly successful enterprises.

Patricia Callan, director of the Small Firms Association, with myself and Senator Feargal Quinn at the launch of EVOLVE

He has every faith in the process outlined in EVOLVE, which offers a step-by-step guide to putting your vision and values at the heart of your business.   Senator Quinn also believes that entrepreneurs can play an important role in promoting this style of business leadership.

With EVOLVE publisher Brian O'Kane of Oak Tree Press.

EVOLVE is now available at all good bookshops and at Amazon on: http://ow.ly/8AHl8  - for the paperback version and at: http://ow.ly/8AHsf - for the Kindle e-book.

Many thanks to Senator Feargal Quinn for performing the launch so perfectly and to publisher Brian O’Kane of Oak Tree Press.

With big business and its role in our economic crisis still under close scrutiny, is it time now for a new business culture which puts values and meaning at centre stage? This is one of the key questions raised in my new book EVOLVE, which is being launched by Senator Feargal Quinn in Dublin on Tuesday 17^th January.  

As you know, I am a business development and growth specialist  a management accountant and a certified management consultant, and my work with hundreds of businesses over the years has led me to conclude that everyone has it within themselves to truly succeed in business – to truly succeed.

I am delighted that EVOLVE has been acclaimed by Senator Quinn and Ian Talbot of Chambers Ireland.  The book has also been commended by Tina Roche, CEO of Business in the Community Ireland.  “For some unknown reason, during the last decade, many people parked their values at the door of the job and gave in to the call of Mammon,” says Tina.  “This has led directly to the times of high anxiety we live in now. People are, once again, examining their values. Are the principles we espouse carried through in the practice and behaviours? Paul addresses these questions and comes up with interesting conclusions.”

For my part, what I contend in the book is that when we lift the veil on who we are as individuals and marry that with our business skills, then we have the ability to reach our full potential.  By working with this inner knowing and applying the principles outlined in this book, you can build a successful business. If you get these foundations right, you will have a business that is sustainable for years into the future.  From this evolved space, you can make a real difference in your organisations as leaders.

In his reponse to the book, CEO of Chambers Ireland, Ian Talbot said many of the concepts ”will resonate with readers as elements they bring, or aspire to bring, to their own business lives but  EVOLVE gives a context and holistic approach which will be invaluable and inspirational” .

 Senator Feargal Quinn says the book “reminds us that successful businesses are those that make a profit while at the same time bringing benefits to the wider community. To enable employees to ‘get up in the morning looking forward to coming to work’ is an objective that every business can strive to achieve because, with that spirit, everyone wins, including customers!”

 Scientist and author, Dr David R Hamilton, says the book explains  “is how you can harness the forces of destiny and the power of your thoughts so as to reach your own success in business and more importantly in life to make this a better world.”

 My publisher Brian O’Kane of Oak Tree Press says “this book opens us up to a world of possibilities that are often ignored in a business context, although they are critical both for businesses and for businesspeople personally as we EVOLVE in the way we do business.”

 EVOLVE: Look within Yourself for Business Success by Paul Davis will be published by Oak Tree Press on 16 January 2012, price €12.95.

www.thebookevolve.com / www.oaktreepress.com

Published by Oak Tree Press – January 2012

It’s been an important year for me.  My new book “EVOLVE – Look Within Yourself For Business Success” has just been published online and will be in bookstores in the middle of January. 

As you know from my website, it’s not my first book but it is the first time I have shared so many personal beliefs about how to achieve real business success in a principled and meaningful way for you, as business leaders.  In EVOLVE, I share these beliefs and outline how you can use them as the basis for a structured approach to running your business. This book for me is about how we can truly succeed in life and in business.

I believe that when we lift the veil on who we are as individuals and marry that with our business skills, then we have the ability to reach our full potential. By working with this inner knowing and applying the principles outlined in this book, we will have a business that is sustainable for years into the future.  From this evolved space, we can make a real difference in our organisations as leaders.

So far, I’ve had a great response to EVOLVE.  CEO of Chambers Ireland, Ian Talbot says that many of the concepts “will resonate with readers as elements they bring, or aspire to bring, to their own business lives but Paul’s new book EVOLVE gives a context and holistic approach which will be invaluable and inspirational.”

Senator Feargal Quinn says the book “reminds us that successful businesses are those that make a profit while at the same time bringing benefits to the wider community. To enable employees to ‘get up in the morning looking forward to coming to work’ is an objective that every business can strive to achieve because, with that spirit, everyone wins, including customers!”

It is my hope and intention that this book will open you up to a world of possibilities that are often ignored in a business context, although they are critical both for businesses and for businesspeople personally as we EVOLVE in the way we do business.

You can buy the e-book now on Kindle: http://amzn.to/rIchxU or order your advance copy of the book on Amazon: http://amzn.to/v2ZUbQ