It might sound obvious, but it isn’t to many businesses. If current sales levels don’t support the overheads and other cash demands on the business, then your overdraft will keep increasing. This means that your business in its current state is not viable (unless you have ongoing access to new funds from investors or financiers). There are five ways to improve your sales levels. These are: 1 . Increase customer retention . Stop your customers from defecting to the competition. 2 . Generate more leads . Gain more enquiries from people who are not yet customers. 3. Increase your sales conversion rate. Get more of your prospects to buy from you. 4. Increase transaction frequency. Engage your customers to buy from you more often. 5. Increase transaction value. Help your customers to buy more products or services from you. There are literally hundreds of individual strategies that you can implement within these categories to increase sales. Sending you a list would be pretty silly of us and overwhelming for you. Some strategies don’t apply to your industry, and some just won’t work in your business for whatever reason. What we have found through experiencing a wide range of client situations over the years, is that certain things do work in each type of business. There’s a pattern that we see in clients - both good and bad! How does a business grow its sales without its owners becoming overwhelmed by a mountain of change? The best and most supportive way to grow and improve a business is to have someone looking over your shoulder from time to time, helping you build a plan and a forecast, and keeping you accountable to making the changes that will make the most important differences. Without that support, we all end up in our business and never working on it. Talk to us about how we can provide that support.

Overheads isn’t typically a place where you will find a lot of wastage. Our experience is that business owners are very careful about managing their expenses, and the smaller the business, the truer that statement is. Having said that, as a business grows, so do the layers of hierarchy. Management control can deteriorate, and the business can become a bit flabby. The trick is to trim the fat but not the muscle when evaluating your expenses. As an absolute minimum, every business should do a thorough review of its overheads at the same time every year, so that it becomes a natural routine. Here are some questions to ask yourself: Do appropriate managers and key staff have individual expense budgets? If so, how are these managed? Have you conducted a formal review of all debt service costs and related fees? What policies and cost control processes are in place for sales staff? Include all working away allowances, vehicle reimbursement expenses, entertainment, and credit card use. What was your total marketing and advertising spend for the last 12 months? Have you analysed each component of spend based on effectiveness and results to the business? When was the last time you renewed your IT support contract? Have you negotiated a fixed monthly fee? If so, is your current fee and contract appropriate (consider migration of services to cloud)? List all subscriptions you pay monthly for SaaS cloud services. Are you using all these services and on the right plan for each? Conduct a cost-benefit analysis. And finally, do you consider your accounting fees a cost or an investment? If they’re a cost, you need to reduce them. If you’re getting value from your annual spend with us, maybe you should invest more to get better business outcomes! Best practice for keeping control over spending is to set budgets and monitor them monthly. Talk to us about the best way to do that. We can show you the impact reducing your overheads can have on your cashflow.