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Got Goals? Congratulations! 7 Steps to Getting Traction in the Coming Year

February 6, 2024

By Barbara Nuss, CPA
Profit Soup

Congratulations! Your team just completed its first-ever strategic planning day. The creative ideas flowed freely. The team set challenging performance goals, created a plan to address two big structural issues and chose one exciting new opportunity to develop. Everybody exchanged high-fives at the end of the day.

It’s one thing to have a vision and another to create sustained change, especially when we find ourselves back in the familiar fray of life in a closely held business. It’s easy to slip into the old routines and let the tyranny of our urgent day-to-day problems crowd out our important long-term goals. Unless you change things up, before you know it the year will have passed, and your retreat goals will be a distant memory.

Here are 7 steps to build and maintain traction towards your big important goals.

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Talking about KPI’s

January 9, 2024

Choose “Just the Right KPIs” and Make Reviewing them a Team Sport

Leadership teams that focus on the right KPIs perform better than those that don’t. Choosing and monitoring the right Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, keeps teams focused on the things that matter most so they can drive efficiently drive sales, customer satisfaction, operations and financial results.

Over the years we’ve coached top performing owners and conducted many financial benchmark studies examining how highly profitable companies manage to generate their high returns. One thing we learned from this: their success is not by accident!

Leaders who consistently use “just the right KPIs” to set goals and track improvement find themselves in the top 25% of their industry. Those KPIs help them find their way to higher profits. Here are some best practices to help you identify your “just the right KPIs” for your company.

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How to Succeed as a Rural Small Business

June 15, 2023

You were country when country wasn’t cool. And now you’re ready to launch your small business at the core of rural America. It may not always feel like your big dreams can become reality in a small town, but in 2023, rural businesses are thriving. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the nation’s manufacturing jobs — once the beating heart of rural economies — sharply declined through the 2000s. But in the last few years, those jobs have been replaced by service and retail roles, largely in small businesses.

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Consulting Traction in 6 Easy Steps: A Business Fable of Helping Clients Reach Their Dreams

June 13, 2023

Imagine it is your last counseling session of the year with one of your favorite clients, Zoe. Together you are celebrating her record-setting year-end profits and revenue. For the first time ever, she was able to pay meaningful bonuses and her team is ecstatic. She’s made plans to invest some of her profits in a new location. Yes, there were challenges along the way, but for the first time Zoe felt her business’s performance was not all on her shoulders. Her team stepped up and were instrumental in making it happen.

As you and Zoe reflected on what made the difference, six key steps stood out.

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If you want to build a Multi-million Dollar Company, start with the end in mind and have a plan

April 19, 2023

By Profit Soup

A good way to build your business value is to start with the end in mind. For example:

    • What do you want to accomplish?
    • What do you need, financially, to move on after you’ve accomplished it?
    • What is your exit strategy?

To create value is to maximize the combined return that occurs throughout your tenure of ownership and when you exit. If you can identify the return you wish to receive both along the way and at the end of the road, you can build a plan to achieve it. How and when you intend to exit the business will determine what you need to accomplish before that day comes.

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