How setting a budget can empower you
“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”- King Richard? (placeholder, need a better one). These words couldn’t be truer- if you approach a task without a plan, you’re rarely going to succeed- and if you do, it’s probably luck. But if you plan, you’re creating a blueprint for success for yourself and your business. This blueprint can be translated to realistic and attainable goals for your business to achieve.
Running a business is one of the most complex tasks in the world, and you really need to be a jack-of-all-trades to be super successful. One of the places business owners slip up the most is on the financial side. Business owners are visionaries- they don’t want to get caught up in the weeds of the day to day expenses, nobody does. However, knowing these expenses is crucial to know how the company is performing- at the end of the day, it’s the cash coming in and out of the bank account that keeps the business alive and flourishing.
Creating a plan is one thing- executing is another. If you want to make sure you stick to your plan, you need to track your progress on a continuous basis. Tracking on a continuous basis will help avoid a backlog of record keeping. This will help evaluate your current performance and compare you to your blueprint for success.
The level of detail you are tracking at will help determine the insights you are getting- so the work you put in will lead to direct results as you will know more about your customer behavior and expense history. Having quality data is important to give you insights into your business that can’t be captured with even the closest of watchful eyes? (weird wording here), You can track things like expenses over time, item popularity and profitability, inventory tracking, breakeven analysis, etc. These metrics will help you make more informed business decisions, and can be used to develop next steps for your business model.
Some key takeaways of how budgeting & tracking your performance benefits you are
You see all of the details of your business and have as good of an understanding as possible of what is happening on a financial basis
You gain key insights into consumer behavior and profitability
You can create your own metrics that you want to track for your own business
You can set realistic goals for yourself to strive towards and track your progress
