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What Does a Successful New Business Have in Common with Liam Neeson? A Very Particular Set of Skills

March 4, 2024

By Barbara Nuss, CPA
Profit Soup

“… I can tell you I don’t have money, but what I do have is a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career.” Liam Neeson, Taken

The particular set of skills all business leaders need won’t make them action movie heroes, but experience shows us they will become the fastest to grow sales and profits. The best thing about this particular set of skills is that it doesn’t have to take a very long career to master them.
Businesses grow faster when they have a command over what we call “Breakeven PLUS.” They must understand how their costs change as sales grow and master a small amount of math.

What’s our evidence? We hear it from many clients who use our online training to onboard new franchisees and network members. We’ll use one franchise system that conducts water damage restoration services as an example. Their goal was to help new their owners become comfortable with the numbers side of the business. They discovered an added benefit when they required the Breakeven PLUS training for all new franchises. By learning to set growth goals with the volume needed to meet their profit goal in mind, owners were more intentional about sales and profits and grew faster.

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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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Using Libraries to Enhance Entrepreneurship

December 6, 2023

By Jim Takeshita

Even under the best of circumstances, starting and maintaining a small business is a costly, complex, and time-consuming process. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur with a good idea, an experienced operator trying to meet a bottom line, or a local creative seeking community connection: Where do you go if you’re not sure what your next step is?

Try your library.

Libraries, such as the St. Louis County Library, report saving small business owners significant money each year (check out the American Library Association’s Library Value Calculator for more). This potential for cost savings is a national trend: Across the United States, libraries in every locality provide entrepreneur support resources of all kinds, from workshops and networking opportunities to specialized media equipment and market research. Working with a local library is a good way for prospective and established small business owners to get the help they need—and a good way for business support organizations to extend the reach and impact of their services.

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