Business Development

These seven steps are linked to the ‘marginal gains philosophy’, which demonstrates that by increasing your profits by a small percentage at each of these steps, the result would be significantly greater with the cumulative effect.

Having trigger points in place helps you base difficult decisions on fact and therefore makes it less emotional when communicating the decisions behind your actions to the person or people they affect.

To save you from the whole spiel, I’m only going to look at what I believe are the three most valuable parts of SMARTER goals: Specific, Achievable, Realistic, and we’ll touch on measuring, time, evaluating and reviewing as we go.

The earlier you can plan for major change, the better it is for guiding your business decisions. Planning to exit your business is a major change often considered too late.

At this stage you are looking to increase revenues without a substantial increase in costs and create a framework that will underpin your growth plans. Put simply, it is a positive, change in your business that has a measurable outcome.

There are actions you can take to weigh up the value of the risk. The first step in calculating whether to take it or not is usually to understand your own limits. Understand your comfort zone and how far you’re willing to push those limits.