3 step action plan for SME owners to ensure a successful restart of their business

Having control and monitoring cash accurately is a paramount– not for just 90 days, but for at least end of 2020. We will work together to extend the forecast through 2021.

In a typical environment, when the business is profitable enough, and sales are taken for granted, cashflow monitoring is secondary. Some of our clients do not do it at all, and we rely only on P&L quarterly profit monitoring.

Your business will go bankrupt if you run out of money. Hence, you need to know how to control the floor to survive. It will also indicate how quickly the sales effort needs to be started/restarted to minimise the cash gap. 

The premise is that ideally, 2020 should end up with a minimum loss. A very ambitious target for 2021 is to breakeven.

We’ll help with setting two sales targets after a pipeline analysis:

• minimum target: sales needed to break even in the second part of the year and incur only a total annual loss of the first part of the year, in any
• sensible target (and stretchy for a lot of businesses): to aim to break even for the entire year, i.e. no loss.

In this environment, people naturally hesitate to buy – the sale cycle is much longer and pushing the boat out on prospects may alienate them forever. So let’s take it easy.

The last step is to review your longer-term plans. Here we will help tailor your sales effort to the new environment by answering the most frequently asked questions right now:

• market segment
• pricing
• cost
• product

Answering these questions will get you ready to start forecasting the year 2021 with a new revenue structure to see the impact on your profitability longer term.