7 Audits Your Business Should Be Carrying Out Each Year

StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Article |Business Audits|7 Audits Your Business Should Be Carrying Out Each YearAudits are necessary for identifying problems with your business and making improvements. They are pretty much thorough inspections that focus on a specific area of your business. Financial audits are the most common example, but you can carry out audits on various other aspects of your business too from marketing to security.

In many cases, an audit involves outsourcing a third-party service. That said, you can carry out your own internal audits – providing that you know what you’re looking for. Many businesses do not carry out audits regularly. Some may never carry out audits at all. However, you should ideally be organising them annually. Below are just a few business audits that are worth carrying out each year.

Financial

A financial audit can help you to better understand how you’re spending your money, and can also help you to make sure that your records are accurate so that you declare the right amount of tax. Big companies will typically carry out a financial audit every quarter. At the very least, you should be carrying out a financial audit every year.

During an audit, you want to gather all necessary financial documents. Make sure that there are no missing copies of invoices, bank statements or receipts, and then make sure that all these records are stored somewhere safe in an organised manner (nowadays this is typically done digitally).

A financial audit can be a time for identifying late payments you may have forgotten to chase up. You can also look at exactly how much you’re earning and spending and work out if there are any regular outgoing payments that are worth cancelling or reducing.

Marketing

It can also be worth regularly carrying out marketing audits to measure the progress of your marketing. This could allow you to identify issues with your marketing so that you can make any necessary corrections.

A digital strategy audit could focus on aspects such as SEO, paid advertising and general brand consistency. When it comes to the likes of SEO, it could be worth taking steps such as checking for broken links, checking algorithm updates and checking competitor keywords.

After this audit, you can then make any alterations to your marketing strategy that are necessary. This could include everything from fixing brand inconsistencies to focusing on new keywords.

HR

If you are an employer, a human resources audit could also be worth carrying out. This can be an opportunity to check that you’re providing for your employees in the best way possible – and that your employees are serving you in the best possible way.
What are some things to check during an HR audit? Start by looking at your employee performance. Are any employees failing to meet targets? Are others exceeding them? Such data can help you to work with employees that are struggling, while rewarding employees that are exceeding targets. It could even be a chance to reorganise your team and their roles.

You should then look at what you’re offering employees and whether you could improve this. Are other companies offering better wages or better benefit packages? Are certain benefits not being taken advantage of? This could be a chance to reassess your benefit package.

Don’t forget to also schedule one-on-one meetings with employees. This could be a chance to raise issues with them and get suggestions on things to improve to make your employees happier and more productive.


IT

Every year, it can be worth inspecting your company’s use of tech to make sure that you’re using the right hardware and applications.

This is a great opportunity to get rid of old tech that is no longer serving you well and embrace new tech. Take the time to compare other hardware and software options out there and decide whether it’s worth migrating.

Try to identify common problems you may be having with your tech and use this as an opportunity to look for solutions. For example, if your company wi-fi is temperamental, it could be a time to look into a new internet service or wi-fi range extenders. Make sure to do your research when choosing new tech and take the time to train employees how to use this new tech.

Security

It could also be worth carrying out security audits to check that your company is as secure as it can be. This involves checking for vulnerabilities that you can patch up.

Examples of things to look at in a digital security audit could include password strength, software security (is any software about to lose support?) and data backup (how many of your files are backed up?). A physical security audit could meanwhile look into things like visitor records and window/door security.

Once you’ve identified security vulnerabilities, you can take steps to patch up these vulnerabilities. Make sure to alert employees of any security updates and train them to carry out any new security protocol that you introduce.

Health and safety

A health and safety audit can help to identify any hazards within your business that could be worth guarding against.

This could include fire safety, slip/fall prevention, air quality, PPE usage and possibly driver safety (if you have drivers working for you). If you sell a product, you may also want to consider how your product can be made safer.

A health and safety audit could help to identify safety measures that you need to invest in such as new fire extinguishers, better guardrails or new PPE. You could also use the opportunity to develop new safety protocol that you can train to employees.

Compliance

A compliance audit involves checking that you are complying with all recommended business laws and guidelines necessary to your company. This ensures that you cannot be fined or sued, as well as helping to possibly earn optional certificates or badges.

A compliance audit may be something that you can work into each of the above audits, rather than carrying out a separate audit for it (for example, data compliance checks could be incorporated into an IT or marketing audit, while employee law compliance checks can be incorporated into a HR audit). A commercial legal advisor may be able to help you identify areas of compliance to focus on.

5 Transformational Benefits of Consultancy Services to Your Business

StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Article | 5 Transformational Benefits of Consultancy Services to Your BusinessAccording to recent studies, incorporating professional services into business management is one way to achieve your objectives fast. This is possible by choosing the right business consultancy services in your area. Besides understanding the ways to improve your operations and motivating your workforce, companies such as FTI Consulting can serve your business interests in other ways. This guide explains the transformational benefits.

Designing a Plan With Realistic Goals

Every entrepreneur has specific goals to achieve in a specific time frame. A plan is crucial in achieving these goals. By working with a consultancy service, you get an avenue to create a plan that will help in meeting your immediate and future goals. They work with you and ensure you understand how designing a plan is crucial in achieving realistic goals.

Focus on Core Business Capacities

It can be a challenge for a business to analyze and focus on its core operations and service delivery capacities. Working with a consultancy firm helps you know your capabilities as a business and how you can focus on getting the best from your efforts. Consultancy services allow you to work with specialists, instructors, and other professionals that ensure you focus on core business capacities to positively transform your venture.


Increases Cost Effectiveness

It might take you months of investing in your workforce to determine their capacities and ensure productivity. This, in the long run, means spending more than planned. The case is different for working with agencies like the professionals at FTI Consulting as they use their expertise to train your workforce and get the best from them within weeks. You also pay for the services rendered and avoid the extra costs of educating and training your employees.

Fills In Knowledge Gaps

While you expect your workforce to give out their best, the knowledge gap present can make it hard. Their strengths and weaknesses can conflict and create a knowledge and skills gap that needs filling. Working with a consultancy service helps you identify these gaps and provide guidance on ways to fill them. They also help identify experts you can hire to fill the knowledge gap and achieve your business objectives.

Catalyst for Change

A business can struggle to identify the changes it needs to make to achieve its objectives. A business consultant sees things from a different perspective. You need a different insight into the problems to come up with solutions. By hiring and working with a business consultant, you get a catalyst for change. They help you embrace the changes and ensure you transform your business for the better.

The decision to look for and work with a business consultancy firm is a step toward transforming your venture positively. By understanding the related benefits, choosing the right consultant is easy. The explained benefits should encourage you to look for and work with one today.

What It Takes To Turn Your Failing Business Around

StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Article |Failing Business|What It Takes To Turn Your Failing Business AroundIt takes a great deal of effort, timing, and entrepreneurial skills to build a business from scratch. Therefore, it can be heartbreaking to see your hard work not paying off or performing as it should. A 2019 report by the National Business Capital indicated that although 6.5 million companies are set up annually in the USA, failure rates still hang around 90%. That’s not good news for the job market when workers cannot vouch for the long-term business survival of the establishments they work for. How can you get your customers back? What options can you utilize to turn things around? Hopefully, these points will be helpful to your cause.

1. Identify what could have gone wrong with the leadership team

This should be the first step to take as you embark on a mission to turn things around. It involves reassessing your business operations, starting with leadership. You may discover that some poor leadership decisions may have been responsible for your establishment doldrums. Leadership is a significant part of any business, and it’s highly recommended to get the right executive team to hold the fort.

A strong executive team is supposed to make decisions to steer business objectives, and that starts with your hiring decisions. So, if you run a print company, for instance, it would be wise to seek the services of packaging headhunters for your C-suite positions. These experts have access to a vast pool of talent that you may not necessarily have and would be in the best place to help you fill those top-level vacancies. You could use their services to fill other positions, which leads to the next point.

2. Invest in your support team

Your employees make up the backbone of your company, and when you treat them right, you will achieve positive results. Investing in your team means making a conscious effort to make your employees feel welcome and appreciated. Keep in mind that the business is failing and staff morale is already low. To get their interests and commitment back to where it was before (or even a notch higher), you must engage them fully. How can you do that?

For starters, recognize their contributions, invest in their training, and improve working conditions (even if minimal). Indeed, you can do so many things to bring the ‘vibe’ back into the team. Perhaps, finance is an issue, and paying for their training isn’t a feasible idea. If that is the case, you have two options to explore. The first is to research online training packages which are less costly. The second option is to recreate enhanced job titles with added benefits to compel them to stay. Investing in your team is a mark of compassion and indicates your entrenched position to turn things around for the better.

3. Institute new money management procedures

According to entrepreneur.com, 70% of business failures are primarily finance-based. With this statistic at the back of your mind, one essential step to take is to restructure your company’s money management procedures. Pay critical attention to your cash inflows and outflows. Additionally, if you haven’t already done so, set up a separate bank account for your business.

Unfortunately, this is a terrible habit of new entrepreneurs. Failure to separate these two critical bank accounts makes it impossible to keep track of inflows and outflows. Another thing you should do is to hire an accounting team or outsource the service (whichever works for you and the business). With new stringent measures in place, you can even detect areas in your company where money leaks, allowing you to fix them. While at it, put a halt to all needless costs your business is engaged in.

4. Focus on a facelift for all company digital platforms

As an entrepreneur, you cannot underestimate the essence of digital platforms in the 21st century. If you need a reminder, think about the COVID pandemic and how it caused businesses to jump onto the digitization bandwagon. Your website and all official social media handles deserve a facelift to give your company a new look. You have everything to lose when your business fails, which explains the vital need for stringent measures.

It’s also an opportunity to add new content to your website, redesign it, and draw appeal to your brand. When it comes to social media, make a deliberate effort to engage the public even more. Where necessary, you can run promos to build up excitement. What works recently for most companies is the story-telling video narrative. And you can put your business story on a roll with the right script and compelling imagery. Use the moment to appeal to the masses and draw new leads. Even though it’s a failing business, it doesn’t mean you’re entirely down.

Furthermore, if you find it necessary, a total rebranding is recommended, but that can be expensive. Therefore, if your finances are weak, concentrate on your digital platforms, easily accessible to the general public. Your online accounts represent the company’s face and play a significant role in customers’ image of you.

5. Re-examine existing marketing activities

For every business, the primary focus is the customer. Beyond acquiring the customer is the need to retain them and draw even more. For a failing business, this may be something you lack. This must be a priority as an astute business-minded individual because repeat business directly influences your marketing activities.

While re-assessing your marketing strategies, find out whether your business’s approach has always been sales-focused, as the opposite can hurt marketing and revenue in the long term. If that is so, your priority now should be adding value to your business’s customer base. That alone will drive publicity and bring in more revenue to revive your company. In addition to that, introduce a limited special offer promotion to get back on the minds of your target audience.

6. Find a business partner

There’s nothing better than locating much-needed help just when it’s crucial. For businesses, partnership means more than just two or more forces coming together. The key is to find a strategic business partner to pull your company out of the doldrums. It would help if you asked yourself whether your new business partner shares the same values as your establishment. Secondly, how much are they willing to put in, and what will be their expectations when things begin to look brighter?

Additionally, what business acumen is that strategic partner coming on board with? In that regard, it’s vital to know whether they experienced a similar situation in the past and pulled through successfully. Now that will be excellent news for your company, won’t it? The fresh pair of eyes you have by way of a new business partner helps you see things you ordinarily wouldn’t have noticed on your own. That can make a huge difference when your business gets back on track.

Be receptive to innovative ideas

If you wish to turn your failing business around, what’s the sense in holding on to old and mundane strategies? Remember that the only constant in life is change, and it’s no different from the business world. Embracing innovative ideas opens the business up to several potentials it wouldn’t have had if you remained unreceptive to them. Do not forget that your open-mindedness as a leader is reflective of your company’s operations. It also has a ripple effect on your staff’s motivation.

It takes a lot of skill, creativity, and unadulterated business intelligence to turn around a failing business. Admittedly, it’s not an easy task to do, but it will be worth all the effort you and your team put in to get things back on track.

Diagnosing Business Problems and Fixing Them in the Most Efficient Way Possible

StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Article |Business Problems|Diagnosing Business Problems and Fixing Them in the Most Efficient Way PossibleBusinesses can encounter a plethora of problems during day-to-day operations. However, they can also be affected by long-term issues that, if left alone for too long, can result in massive profit losses and sharp drops in consumer confidence. As such, it’s extremely important to diagnose these problems as soon as possible so they can be dealt with in the most efficient way.

While this sounds like obvious advice, it’s surprisingly difficult for businesses to optimize their problem-solving process. So to help you out, we’ve prepared this post to help you diagnose issues and fix them in the most efficient way you can.

Identifying the business problem

First, make sure you invest time into identifying the business problems that are affecting your business. This sounds easy, but the reality is that most people are only looking at the symptoms of the problem and the problem itself. For example, people might look at falling profits as the problem itself. But what exactly is causing that problem? Is it because there are competitors who are rising above you? Is it your business model that is outdated? Or is your team to blame for your business’s shortcomings?

In reality, it’s usually a combination of these factors that affects your profits. Sadly, there’s no way to easily identify the problem and solve it. Instead, what you’ll need to do is make use of feedback from employees and look at actionable sets of data to help you make informed decisions. This involves a bit of setup as you need to establish processes that actually record this kind of data. For example, if you believe that your business model is to blame, then you’ll need to pull up statistics that relate to your business processes. This can include sales numbers, your ROI on advertising and promotions, and click-through rates.

Applying the right solution to the problem

In most cases, business problems will have multiple solutions. For example, a broad problem such as falling sales can be fixed in many different ways depending on the root cause. It could involve focusing on customer service, expanding your range of products, or even just advertising more.

Applying the right solution can be tricky because there are many different ways to fix something, hence why it’s important to work with experts such as Jim Thomas of Atlanta. The benefit of hiring a specialist is that they can see your business from an outside perspective. They have a better view of everything because they’re looking from the outside in, and you get a better idea of what you need to do because they can look at your business objectively.

Finding the right solution is tricky, but with the right assistance, you can make it simple and painless. It’s better than trying many different solutions and ultimately failing because you’re inexperienced or unsure of what the root cause of the problem is. Diagnosing and fixing business problems doesn’t need to be difficult, but it does require a bit of investigation and investment.

How To Be Constantly Improving Your Business

StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program (BPAP) Article |Improving Your Business|How To Be Constantly Improving Your BusinessYour business may be getting by currently, but it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to achieve or sustain long-term success. The reality is that nothing is promised to you, and you must stay ahead of the game and curve if you’re going to be able to retain customers and win over new ones. To do so, you must focus on ways you can constantly be improving your business and getting ahead.

As the business owner and leader, it’s your job to put measures in place that help you to achieve and exceed your goals and customer expectations. You want to make forward progress before it’s too late, and all your hard work becomes irrelevant. Now is the time to step up and take control of your business and figure out what you can be doing to excel and win over more customers.

Revisit Your Goals

You can be constantly improving your business by revisiting your goals often. Although you have a good idea about what you want to accomplish in the next few years, it doesn’t mean that the information is set in stone. Evaluate the situation regularly and determine what’s working and where the gaps exist so you can make necessary adjustments to your plan. Remain flexible and adaptable so that you can modify your approach and management style based on what you’re observing around you. Make amendments that will help you reach your goals at a quicker rate and keep you from wasting precious time and resources.

Train Your Employees

Improve your business by investing in your employees and their futures with your company. You have to communicate expectations early on and set them up for success if you’re going to get the performance results you desire. It’s in your best interest to train your employees and get them all on the same page and up to speed with recommended business processes. Make your training events such as employee onboardings, software training, and corporate learning events more successful by using an iPad rental service. Each person will have their own technology device to use and will be more engaged in the educational programming you’re offering this way.

Gather Feedback

It’s easy to make quick judgments and assumptions in the workplace, but this may cause you more problems in the long run. Instead, constantly be improving your business by collecting feedback from employees and clients frequently. It’ll help you to make better decisions based on data and facts instead of you playing guessing games. You may find that some areas need your attention that you thought were going smoothly. Gathering this information will provide you with valuable insights into what you should be focusing on as you strive to make improvements at your company.

Follow Industry News & Updates

Another way to be constantly improving your business is to follow industry news and updates. Knowing what’s going on with your target audience and niche will help you to adapt and roll out better products and services. Understand how your industry is changing and evolving and what impact technology is having on your business. Take the time to read relevant blogs and follow thought leaders on social media so that important information doesn’t pass you by. You’re going to be able to predict future trends better with this knowledge and impress customers with your agility and ability to innovate.

Be Open to Learning

When you improve your skills, your business will also improve. If you become too comfortable and stagnant as a boss and leader, then you risk your business following in your footsteps. Therefore, be open to learning and working on becoming more knowledgeable in areas that are unfamiliar and challenging for you. Take online courses, attend seminars, and converse with other business leaders so you can advance your skill set. You’ll want to not only educate yourself but also implement what you learn at your workplace so you can make impactful changes to your current approach. Remain curious and inquisitive so that you’re always taking new information in and can avoid assuming you know it all.

Evaluate the Competition

Your competitors are going to be right at your heels, just waiting for you to make mistakes and take a wrong turn. They want to steal customers away from you and make sure they’re number one. Therefore, it’s in your best interest to evaluate the competition regularly if you want to be constantly improving your business. Focus on identifying where they’re falling short and figuring out how you can step in and offer solutions to problems that they aren’t currently solving. Learn from their mistakes and build off of their successes so you can stand above and apart from your competitors.

Address what’s Broken

Looking the other way and ignoring significant problem areas your business is facing will only backfire on you. Your employees must have the tools and resources they need to perform their jobs so they aren’t always fighting an uphill battle. You can constantly be improving your business by addressing and fixing what’s broken. Be a good listener and hear what your employees and clients are saying and what their pain points are so you can deal with the situation. Although there may be a mess to untangle, your hard work to rectify the situation will help move your business forward in the right direction.

Find A Mentor

Constantly be improving your business by finding a mentor who you can rely on for advice and input. Use this person as a sounding board and try to understand the reasoning behind their recommendations so you can apply the lessons you’re learning in the future. You’re going to have questions and issues that arise along the way, and it’ll be helpful to have someone you trust in your corner that you can bounce ideas off of as you go. Learn from their past mistakes and experiences so you can avoid these same mishaps at your workplace. A mentor is a helpful observer and will be able to objectively tell you what you’re doing right and what may be holding you back from achieving a higher level of success.

Take Calculated Risks

No one in business ever made it too far without diving into unknown waters and taking a chance. Improve your business by getting away from the business as usual mentality and instead taking calculated risks based on your problem-solving skills. Sometimes you have to step outside your comfort zone and do what’s not so easy if you want to make a true difference in the business world. You want to feel comfortable moving forward with your decision and also have a backup plan in place if you should fail or begin to struggle. The good news is that if you’re right, taking a risk may be the best choice you ever made for your company.

Conclusion

Being able to improve your business around the clock may require a lot of hard work and effort on your part but the rewards that come with it can be priceless. You risk falling behind and becoming irrelevant if you aren’t willing to take chances and make changes as a business owner. You can’t rely on what you’ve always done to get you to the next level. It takes a commitment and you dedicating yourself fully to overcoming obstacles and staying the course even when you stumble and fall or have setbacks. Believe in yourself and give yourself the benefit of the doubt so that you can turn your business around for the better and make impactful improvements.