Preparing your business for a new financial year

Want to know how to prepare your business for a new financial year? A new financial year is a great time to take a moment out to reflect on the past and prepare for the future. The new financial year is a great opportunity to dream big about the 12 months ahead and then make plans to achieve those dreams. Whether you’ve been in business for one financial year or 20 financial years it doesn’t matter. The foundations for preparing your business for a new financial year stay the same. So if you are ready to make the most of the year ahead keep on reading.

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PREPARING YOUR BUSINESS FOR A NEW FINANCIAL YEAR

Review, and reflect, on the past financial year

As the last financial year comes to an end it makes sense to review your business to get a full understanding of what happened in your business and its current position.

I recommend reviewing and reflecting. In the reviewing stage, you’ll be looking at the numbers. For example:

How much revenue did you generate?
How much profit did you make?
How much money were you able to take home personally?
How many services or products did you sell?
What was the revenue breakdown by service or product
What percentage of sales were from new buyers versus repeat buyers?
How many leads or enquiries did you generate?
What % of leads or enquiries came from each marketing channel?
What is your current conversion rate?
How much traffic did your website receive?
What is your average email click-through rate?

Then once you’ve got the numbers it is important to reflect. Numbers only tell part of the picture. For example, it could be that you generated more revenue than the previous year, but you have been working more hours than you’d like to be working. Another example is that you’ve signed more clients, but they aren’t all ideal clients and you’ve found delivering the work hard at times.

Taking the time to review and reflect will give you a real understanding of what has happened in your business and how you have felt about how the business is operating.

Set your annual business goals

After reviewing and reflecting on the past you’ll have a good understanding of the position in the business is in right now. This will act as your Point A and then it is time to think about Point B. Ask yourself “Where do I want this business to be at the end of this financial year?”. The likelihood is that you’ve got lots of ideas of what you’d like to happen.

The first thing you should do is write all of those ideas down. At this moment in time, you don’t need to filter yourself. It is about dreaming big, aiming high, and being honest about your true desires. Then once you’ve written everything down you can review the list and then start to look at the feasibility. All of your ideas are likely to involve time, money, and certain skills/knowledge to make them happen. Do you have everything you need to make those ideas come to life and most importantly can you do all of them within a 12-month period?

Sometimes the answer will be no. That doesn’t mean it is a bad idea, but in business, especially if it is just you or you have a small team, you’ll have to let some good ideas sit on the sidelines for a while. A goal-setting model I like to use in this instance is a Now, Future, Maybe Goals list. Go through your list and identify what is a Now (as in will be something you are committing to happen within the next 12 months), Future (something you’ll want to do in the next few years), Maybe (Something which you like the sound of, but aren’t 100% sure if you’ll ever commit to setting it as a goal). The reason why this goal-setting model works is because you aren’t ignoring your goals. Instead, you are putting them in a place so you won’t forget them and in the meantime, you can concentrate on the ones in the Now section.

At this point, you should have a list of goals that you want to achieve in the next 12 months. Go through the list of goals and make sure they are SMART. SMART stands for There are a few different versions of SMART, but I like to use Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. The aim is to ensure at the end you have a goal that is defined so clearly it is obvious to someone outside of your business whether you’ve achieved the goal or not.

CREATE YOUR PLAN FOR THE NEW FINANCIAL YEAR IN JUST ONE DAY!

Like the sound of creating a plan for the new financial year, but tight on time? I have a tried-and-tested process that I’ve used for years to guide business owners through the annual planning process in just one day.

You fill in a questionnaire before our day together. Then on the day I’ll guide you through my annual planning process, take notes so you are free to just talk and then create your annual plan and timeline. The next day you can get back to your day-to-day work and you’ll receive your plan and timeline. It couldn’t be easier!

For more information and to book a 2023/24 Strategy Day click here.

Review your services and products (their related prices) and then create a financial forecast.

At least one of your business goals should have been financial and the next stage is to get clear on how to make that financial goal happen.

Firstly, look at the services and products you offer. Are you happy to continue offering them all? Is there anything new you’d like to offer over the year? Then look at the pricing. Are you happy with the prices or do some changes need to happen? Once you’ve answered all of those questions should have a clear understanding of the services and products you are going to sell throughout the year.

Then it is time to move on to your financial forecasting. This can be done either on a monthly or quarterly basis. For each service or product you offer, you’ll want to make predictions about the sales you’ll make. Then once you’ve done that for the whole year you’ll be able to add the relevant prices and create a financial forecast for revenue. At this stage, it might be there is a gap between the predicted revenue and your financial goal. This is where you’ll then have to make a decision about whether to adjust your financial goal or change your sales targets.

Once the revenue side of your financial forecasting is done it is time to move on to the expenditure side. Remember when you were thinking about your goals you had to think about the feasibility of achieving those goals. It may be that some of your goals have financial implications beyond your usual business costs. For example, you might have decided to focus on scaling your business. if you decide to launch a membership you might decide to hire a community manager and so those costs needs to be forecasted. You might have decided that you wanted to run a group programme and needed to invest in software, such as Kartra, in order to run the group programme. Going through all of your standard business costs and then thinking about the financial implications of the changes you want to make in the business should give you a good idea of your expected expenditure.

Make a marketing and sales strategy

By now you’ve set goals for your business, you know what you are going to be selling and how many you’ve got to sell. Now it is time to concentrate on how you are going to generate those sales. When preparing your business for the new financial year you won’t be able to go into great detail and create a marketing plan, but you’ll be able to create an overarching strategy. This will cover things such as:

Whether your services and products will be available to buy all the time (evergreen) or whether you’ll be using a launch method
What marketing channels (email, social media, long-form content, paid advertising, affiliates etc ) you’ll use
If you’ll have a marketing budget for the year and if so, how much
Map out the buyer journey
Define your key messages for the business as a whole and each service.
The resources you’ll need (personnel, software and money) to deliver the marketing

Create an annual timeline

Last, but not least, you can create a timeline for the upcoming financial year. Having a timeline will enable you to start to bring everything together and see how they could actually work. It might be that for some of your goals, you are able to take action straight away, but some might involve a set of sequential actions. For example, if you need to hire a new team member in order to support the achievement of a goal then you’ll need to create a job description, do interviews, hire a person, train the person and then they’ll be ready to take the actions that are relevant to a goal.

The power of having an annual timeline is that you can see at a glance whether you are trying to make too much happen at the same time. For example, if you always have a busy June, July and August then it wouldn’t make sense to also decide to do a launch or write your book in that period of time. I know it seems obvious but these things happen all the time when there isn’t one central view.

On your annual plan, you should create a section for each ‘area’ of the business. And this applies even if you look after every area. By breaking it down by area you’ll be able to really understand what is happening across the whole business and notice crunch points sooner rather than later.

That’s it. You now know how to prepare your business for the new financial year.

A new financial year is a great time to step away from the day-to-day operations, step into CEO mode and really think about the future of your business.

The process I’ve just shared is the exact structure I’ve used for years to help business owners prepare for the new financial year. You can absolutely do this process by yourself, which is why I share it, but having someone else to support you makes a massive difference.

Maybe you don’t have an analytical or mathematical mind and so would struggle to effectively review the numbers.

Maybe you have got some money mindset blocks that are would impact the prices you set unless you are being challenged.

Maybe you don’t have the sales and marketing knowledge to create an effective marketing and sales strategy.

If any of the above resonated with you and you’d love the opportunity to work with a marketing expert, who can not only help review your past performance and set your upcoming strategy, but will challenge you to ensure you’ve dreamt big, aren’t letting money mindset blocks hold you back and ensure you are thinking through the practicalities of all your goals book an Annual Planning Strategy Day.

In just one day I’ll guide you through the whole process and ensure that by the end of the day, you have strong goals for your business and a clear plan, that you have confidence in, to achieve those goals.

To find out more, and to book a 23/24 Strategy Day, click here.

WANT HELP CREATING YOUR ANNUAL PLAN FOR THE NEW FINANCIAL YEAR?

You can absolutely create a plan by yourself, but you don’t have to!

I have a tried-and-tested process that I’ve used for years to guide business owners through the annual planning process in just one day.

You fill in a questionnaire before our day together. Then on the day I’ll guide you through my annual planning process, take notes so you are free to just talk, and then create your annual plan and timeline. The next day you can get back to your day-to-day work and you’ll receive your plan and timeline. It couldn’t be easier!