Increase the Profitability of Your Company

How to Increase Business Profits by Meir Liraz

This book will walk you step by step through the development of a profit plan for your business. This will help you increase your profits by up to 64%. It is a simple, practical, common sense strategy, but amazingly enough, only a small group of smart business owners uses it.

In addition the book features the following:

~ Checklist for watching your profit - a penny saved is a penny earned - simple ways to keep profit up and costs down.

~ Planning and goal setting for business profitability - a wise man once said: "If you're not sure where you are going, you're liable to end up someplace else". Here are the tips and techniques that will help make sure you're always on the right track.

~ How to reduce costs - a complete step-by-step organized program for cutting costs in your business. Clients of ours have achieved an average of 28% to 35% cost reduction with this technique, and you can too. Keep the money in your pocket with this one!

~ All these and much much more.

My name is Meir Liraz and I'm the author of this book. According to Dun & Bradstreet, 90% of all business failures analyzed can be traced to poor management. This is backed up by my own experience. In my 31 years as a business coach and consultant to businesses, I've seen practically dozens of business owners fail and go under -- not because they weren't talented or smart enough -- but because they were trying to re-invent the wheel rather than rely on proven, tested methods that work. And that is where this book can help, it will teach you how to avoid the common traps and mistakes and do everything right the first time.

Sample Content:

Profit planning, increasing your business profit, is simply the development of your operating plan for the coming period. Your plan is summarized in the form of an income statement that serves as your sales and profit objective and your budget for cost.

How Is It Used?

Profit planning is used in the following ways:

Evaluating operations. Each time you prepare an income statement, actual sales and costs are compared with those you projected in your original profit plan. This permits detection of areas of unsatisfactory performance so that corrective action can be taken.

Determining the need for additional resources such as facilities or personnel. For example, the profit plan may show that a sharp increase in expected sales will overload the company's billing personnel. A decision can then be made to add additional invoicing personnel, to retain an EDP service, or to pursue some other alternative.

Planning purchasing requirements. The volume of expected sales may be more than the business' usual suppliers can handle or expected sales may be sufficient to permit taking advantage of quantity discounts. In either case, advance knowledge of purchasing requirements will permit taking advantage of cost savings and ensure that purchased goods are readily available when needed.

Anticipating any additional financing needs. With planning, the search for needed funds can begin as early as possible. In this way, financial crises are avoided and financing can be arranged on more favorable terms.

Advantages of Profit Planning

Profit planning offers many advantages to your business. The modest investment in time required to develop and implement the plan will pay liberal dividends later. Among the benefits that your business can enjoy from profit planning are the following:

Performance evaluation. The profit plan provides a continuing standard against which sales performance and cost control can quickly be evaluated.

Awareness of responsibilities. With the profit plan, personnel are readily aware of their responsibilities for meeting sales objectives, controlling costs, and the like.

Cost consciousness. Since cost excesses can quickly be identified and planned, expenditures can be compared with budgets even before they are incurred, cost consciousness is increased, reducing unnecessary costs and overspending.

Disciplined approach to problem-solving. The profit plan permits early detection of potential problems so that their nature and extent are known. With this information, alternate corrective actions can be more easily and accurately evaluated.

Thinking about the future. Too often, small businesses neglect to plan ahead: thinking about where they are today, where they will be next year, or the year after. As a result, opportunities are overlooked and crises occur that could have been avoided. Development of the profit plan requires thinking about the future so that many problems can be avoided before they arise.

Financial planning. The profit plan serves as a basis for financial planning. With the information developed from the profit plan, you can anticipate the need for increased investment in receivables, inventory, or facilities as well as any need for additional capital.

Confidence of lenders and investors. A realistic profit plan, supported by a description of specific steps proposed to achieve sales and profit objectives, will inspire the confidence of potential lenders and investors. This confidence will not only influence their judgment of you as a business manager, but also the prospects of your business' success and its worthiness for a loan or an investment.