According to Verne Harnish, there are seven keys to creating a strategic plan for a business. Here they are -

• Choose the words you want to own in your marketplace. This is especially relevant in the internet age where your prospects are likely to start their search with Google. Choose your words & make sure they rank number one on Google searches.
• Offer a unique brand promise. This is the promise that differentiates you from your competition. For example, 'Lowest Prices Every Day', or 'Real Expertise'
• Make it hurt to break your promise. This is where a money back guarantee can really help to keep you focused on your promise. i.e. Find a better price & we'll beat it by 10%.
• Create a one -phrase strategy. Your one phrase strategy will be an in-house secret, it isn't necessarily a selling point but will help you deliver on your promises i.e only clients with +$1,000,000 in net assets, might be a phrase for a financial planner to live by.
• Support your one-phrase strategy with differentiating actions. Underlying the one-phrase strategy are specific actions that represent how you differentiate your business from your competitors. So in the example above, the financial planning firm might craft their marketing messages accordingly and build their services to be of a very personal nature.
• Establish your X Factor. Your X Factor should give your business a 10X advantage over the competition. Perhaps the financial planning firm mentioned above has special access to financial products that are 10 times easier to deliver to their clients than what their best competitor could manage.
• Measure your profit per X & BHAG ? This is the key measurement that defines the essence of your business model and is tied to your long range goal. BHAG stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal. So what profit is your X Factor bringing to your business to help you achieve that goal?

For small business owners, collecting receivable monies from customers can be a time consuming & frustrating process. Unfortunately, all too often debt collection is relegated to a secondary task behind every day service or supply operations and given that cash is the lifeblood of a business, neglecting to collect your rightful dues from your customers is akin to not feeding yourself.

Here are some processes & strategies to ensure that you collect your receivables on time every time -

Put in place a credit check process for new customers. People & businesses invariably develop patterns of behaviour and not paying debts or paying debts late is a reoccurring trait that should be picked up with a simple credit check. Use a company like Dun & Bradstreet to run your credit check through plus request contact details of two suppliers who will vouch for the new potential customer.

Send a copy of your terms & conditions to new customers for them to sign off on prior to delivering goods or service on credit.

Resend copies of outstanding invoices along with the monthly statement. Invoices are better for jogging customer's minds as to the product or service that they received from your business.

Develop & implement a system for collecting receivables. Every Monday, you or your accounts person should run through a checklist for chasing down outstanding monies. Send copies of invoices where due dates have been exceeded. Call customers who have had a copy of an outstanding invoice. For debts that are more than two weeks overdue, call daily. For debts that exceed your usual terms plus a certain number of days over term, immediately refer the collection process to a debt collection specialist.

Learn from experience. Bad payers generally continue their habitual behaviour so it is good policy to insist that bad payers lose access to your credit.

Remember that the receivable monies are yours. You've provided the service or goods & are entitled to payment. You don't need to beg and should ensure that whoever is tasked with the collection process is forward, demanding & insistent. This does not need to equate to being rude though.

Don't let customers see that you have +60 days or +90 days on your statements. This provides a subconscious signal that you accept long due accounts as part of your business process.

If you are a micro business & too small to have a bookkeeper, outsource your collection process to a company that specialises in debtor handling.

Remember, debtors or receivables belong to you & your business. The sooner you collect the sooner you can use the money to retire interest bearing debt.

Many small business owners are excessively fixated on indirect cost reductions and penny pinching in order to improve the cash flow and profitability of their businesses.

Often cost reductions come about by reducing marketing, advertising, staff amenities and depreciation associated with capital improvement and/or replacement. There is an old business adage that applies here, "you have to spend money to make money". Without appropriate spending in these areas a business will achieve suboptimal growth. Obviously, this is not to say that a business owner should not attempt to find more cost effective alternative goods and services.

In relation to direct costs it is obviously critical to achieve as great a differential between sales and the direct costs as possible in order to optimise gross profit. Gross profit should not be optimised at the expense of product or service quality. Service quality can suffer if insufficient human resources are available to carry out tasks in an efficient and timely manner. Additionally, the potential for sales growth may be limited by long term labour under resourcing.

For long run growth businesses it can actually be beneficial to carry excess labour costs especially if the excess labour can be fully employed with 'value add' tasks such as business development and systems improvement.

Focusing on cutting costs shifts focus away from growing revenue. Revenue growth with good margin discipline will ultimately lead to far higher profitability rather than focusing on cost cutting.

Strategy, its high-church theologians insist, is about outflanking competitors with big plays that yield.....a sustainable advantage. It is questionable whether this proposition is itself sustainable.

The competitive scriptures almost systematically ignore the importance of hustle & energy. 'Tom Peters' - Thriving on Chaos

The above quote is synonymous with how I aim to operate my business, Noble & Associates.

Some of the changes and projects that I've implemented over the last 12 - 18 months include -

• Encouraged and mentored staff to carefully handle the provision of a personal service to clients of the firm.
• Project Management System including full documentation of workflows and training for the staff on using the system.
• Took on a graduate, Andy Goh and provided full on the job training. Another graduate, Vicki Goodrum starts in mid January. Both Andy & Vicki were selected for their personable, friendly way together with high University grades. Andy was educated via a full Curtin scholarship and Vicki received mainly distinctions in her University grades.
• Worked with .Net programmer to design and build phase 1 of an e learning delivery platform for accountants.
• Produced accounting software training content.
• Attended courses on the Business Investment Tax Break, Capital Gains Tax Concessions for Small Business, Changes to the Superannuation System, New Borrowing Rules for Self Managed Superannuation Funds and Estate Planning.
• Developed and deployed wealth1.com.au & businessPros.com.au as well as developed relationships with a financial planning firm, Prescott Securities and business coach, Kristian Reiss from Incrementum Business Coaching.
• Read, watched and listened to information material associated, with energy, technology, the environment, the Australian tax system, economics, the Global Financial Crisis, business development and wealth development.
• Oversaw the conversion of the Noble & Associates information system over to a SQL database running in a virtual environment on the end of a dedicated 2MB fibre connection.
• Oversaw the rebuild of Accounts1, the Noble & Associates server used as a shared environment for our client MYOB & QuickBooks files.

Software or hardware, it does not really matter, what matters is that when you build or design you do so with standards in mind so that you either help to create a set of standards or you fit into an existing set of standards.

Fitting different components together in the 'software world' is refered to as SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)

Here is a great example of components creating a 'whole' - International Space Station comes Together