I thought therefore it would be interesting to focus on a different area of the business and one which can just as easily wipe out your profits as a lack of sales. That is your the processes you use to deliver what you sell and collect money from your customers. I call it squeezing the lemon because in or to help maximise your profits you need to squeeze every once of efficiency and productivity out of you delivery systems.
The problem is often that this is the part of business operations that is often overlooked. As is collection of money. In a recession we all say that cash is kind, but its no different now that things have improved. Almost invariably as sales improve the focus moves away from collecting the money. This is the equivalent of restricting the supply of oxygen to a mountain climber. Yes they might manage to go on but it just makes it a lot harder, and is so unnecessary.
The most obvious measure is your debtor days which is simply the amount of money currently outstanding divided by your current turnover times 365. Your objective then is to keep your debtors days don as low as possible. This keeps cash regularly flowing back into your business and will support further growth.
Squeezing the Lemon isn't just about cash but your whole production and sales support processes.
For example, its making sure that you keep your product delivery times the same, and that you don't allow your quality to be compromised. Or that you have sufficient resources to deliver the same or better quality of proposals to the increased enquiries from customers and prospects.
How might you do this? I know a number of accountants have an ability to benchmark your business against similar organisations in your industry. This will give you a broad areas where you over or under perform your industry average. If you accountant can't help you then its up to you to start finding out how your business is performing. You can do this by setting clear targets, often called KPI's, about the expected performance of parts of your business. I would suggest that you should be setting KPI's for your business anyway.
This could be as simple as:
The average response time for a query into the business.
The average time to produce proposals.
The target time to produce a sub-component.
The target for the percentage of goods delivered on time
The target for the level of customer experience
The key point here is not to take your eye off doing the basics properly and as efficiently as possible. Even a small, 5%, fall off in performance in a couple of areas can have a material impact on your bottom line.
For example, I worked in an automotive business and we had regular quarterly meeting to`see if we could reduce the time taken to produce our 10 biggest sellers. We were often able to save 1% in time by making changes to how we manufactured the components. That's 4% per year, but measured over 10's of thousands of items it has a big impact and can often be the difference between making a loss and making a profit.
The thing about Squeezing the Lemon is that you are constantly looking for improvements in performance to minimise the your costs of production. Normally we all focus on this in a downturn because with lower sales we must reduce costs. By contrast, as soon as sales rise we have a tendency to put efficiency on the back burner. Surely it makes sense to keep squeezing the lemon even when sales are up.
Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for Managing High Growth, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business.
