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Prepare for Profits – 2025, Part 2. 8 Ways to Fight the Profit Pinch

December 30, 2024

By Barbara Nuss, CPA
Founder, Profit Soup

In our recent blog, Prepare for Profits – 2025, Part 1: Your Cost Structure May Never Be the Same, I shared my thoughts about how policy and economic changes might impact cost structures in 2025. I stressed the importance of monitoring your 5-Line P&L. This “Part 2” continuation lists 8 things you should do today to help fight the profit pinch in 2025.

1. Accelerate Equipment Purchases

If you have the financial capacity to act early on purchases you would make in 2025 anyway, you might consider stepping up now.

2. Forecast Your Cash Flow

Talk to your accountant about forecasting cash flow under multiple scenarios so you can plan to have adequate cash reserves or credit lines, Establish a cadence for comparing actual results to budgets by the 15th of each month.

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

February 6, 2024

By Barbara Nuss, CPA
Profit Soup

“Your greatest danger is letting the urgent things crowd out the important. The urgent pressures us daily, while the important waits patiently. ”

Charles Hummel, University President and Author, Tyranny of the Urgent Share on X

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.

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.

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.

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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