The Profit Map – Profitability

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Hi, I’m Judi Otton with GrowthCast and I’m here with your latest Fiscal Fitness Tip of the Week. If you remember from last week I introduced you to my diagnostic tool, the Profit Map. Today, we’re going to go through the first category of this Profit Map, which is profitability. And I’m going to give you a few questions for you to self assess the health of your business when it comes to profitability. So the first question, obviously, are you profitable? Are you profitable every month? Is every month more profitable than the same month last year? These are things to look at. Now, I get that you might have one -time expenses. And depending on how you book your payroll you may have a couple of months where you have three paychecks which will affect your profitability. But in general you obviously want to make money every month and you want to be doing it better than you did last year. My second set of questions for you involve what you Mr. and Ms. (or Mx.) , business owner, what you’re taking home, what you’re putting in your pocket? Are you happy with that? If you’re not, let’s talk, let’s have a conversation. Because there are ways that we can smooth out any rough patches and certainly there’s lots of ways that we can improve your profitability. The third area that we want to look at is do you have a profit goal for this year? This is related to your budget, so if you don’t have a budget it’s not too late. It’s never too late to put something like this together. But you should have a profit goal for this year and you should be tracking how how am I doing with respect to that goal? What do I need to adjust if anything? Am I on track? And finally, the 4th question, can you look at profitability by customer, or by job, or by product or service type? Can you slice it and dice it finely? Or is it just one big number at the end of the month? This is really important and really critical if you want to improve your profitability over time. So this is something that I see that many business owners don’t have and I can help you with that. If you have any questions, as always, feel free to give me a call, reach out in the comments, contact me through my website. This is Judi Otton and with GrowthCast , I’ll be back next week with your Fiscal Fitness Tip of the Week and we’re going to be talking about revenue. See you next week.