Assess (and Address) Challenges to Continued Success

As small business experience success and grow, they get more challenging.  More employees are hired, more customers must be satisfied, financial activity gets more complicated – everything gets more complicated.  Sometimes, the original brilliance of the business start-up makes initial success and growth seem easy. Life is good.

But as businesses grow, they get more complex. Finding more customers requires better marketing; managing more employees gets complicated; and taking on more competition gets tougher. Everything gets more complicated. Life is still good – but more challenging.

Success brings more challenges – but each workday still has only 24 hours. New challenges call for more, and different, skills from the small business owners – skills that they must quickly acquire and that might take them out of their comfort zone. In the search for help, small business owners confront confusing – and expensive – options. They can add staff to cover the full range of business functions needed as their business grows.  Or they can turn to specialized service firms to address specific known problems.

But how does the small business owner know whether they’ve got it all covered?  How can they have confidence that they’re focusing on the right issues? Are they addressing the most important concerns? Is the load of dealing with the challenges of growth and success distracting them from taking advantage of new and emerging opportunities?

This is where McVane Consulting can help. The Established Business Check-up digs deeper into the details across the full breadth of the business activities to identify problems and opportunities – to ensure that nothing is being overlooked. At this stage, the list of issues might be daunting, and fixing them all immediately might be costly. But understanding all the issues, and carefully prioritizing a detailed plan-of-attack is critical.

The typical Established Business – Comprehensive Exam might include:

• All the elements of the Start Business Check-Up – but probably in greater detail and complexity as the business is bigger
  • Discussion of the Owner’s personal goals and expectations for the business
  • Assessment and articulation of the complete business model – to fully understand nine key elements of the business model
  • Review of actual financial performance
  • Review of business entity setup
• Review of financial systems and reports
• Detailed SWOT analysis (strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats)
• Identification of critical next steps to reinforce progress and keep growing