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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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Small Business Insights: 7 Lessoned Learned From Real Business Owners

May 16, 2023

The small business community is thriving now more than ever, with nearly 60% of entrepreneurs belonging to a community group. While product offerings may vary vastly, many key business principles remain universally true. We turned to real business owners and recent studies to share seven small business insights you can take with you into your entrepreneurial journey.

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Build Your Profit Maker’s Intuition with Breakeven PLUS

May 3, 2023

If I were to ask you what is the most important financial skill you need to master to
improve your ability to make more money in your business, what do you think it is?

Benchmarking? Cash Flow Forecasting? Ratio Analysis? Creating Ninja-level
spreadsheet formulas?

The answer is none of the above. It’s mastering Breakeven PLUS. Breakeven PLUS is
the fastest and most effective way to hone what I call your “Profit Maker’s Intuition.”
Once your Profit Maker Intuition is dialed up, your ability to make the right decisions
that lead to more profits goes way up as well.

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Level Up Your Financial Leadership by Using a Coaching Approach

January 24, 2023

By Lauren Owen

As you grow your business, adding employees or even locations, you will need to develop managers who are responsible for achieving sales and profit goals. Mastering your financial coaching skills is essential to profitable growth.

Many owners are comfortable discussing marketing, operations or human resources, but struggle with conversations about financials. How can you get people engaged in this important topic? Here are some tips for creating financial insights and driving action using goal-focused, solutions-oriented coaching conversations to jump-start your managers’ financial success.

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Holiday inventory: Tips your small business can use to manage inventory during the holidays.

December 14, 2022

How to navigate supply chain issues, timing, buying, and more

By Danielle Higley

The holiday season is an exciting — and stressful — time for small business owners. Increased foot traffic, bigger sales goals, and the desire to turn new customers into regular patrons means more pressure than any other time of year.

Piling atop the typical challenges of entrepreneurship, business owners are faced with every conceivable balancing act: Where to put all that additional inventory when there’s limited shelf space. How to get big-ticket items out the door. Ensuring that each item is in the right place at the right time. Meanwhile, 2020 and 2021’s supply chain issues loom like ghosts of Christmases past.

Yet despite all these concerns, Dierdre Appelhans and Barbra Huntting, co-owners of The Read Queen Bookstore & Café, exhibit an admirable sense of peace and confidence going into the 2022 holiday shopping season.

Two and a half years after opening their doors in Lafayette, Colorado, they’re sharing their lessons learned. Here are four of their small business insights for retailers looking to make a holiday inventory plan.

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