Monthly Archives: April 2014

Planning to retire!

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Dark jenny thinking

How many of us know what our business needs to achieve to deliver against our personal goals in the long term?

We all know that the state pension will be unlikely to meet our retirement needs in full. Most of us will be looking for our businesses to provide a safety net of income/capital value to make sure our retirements are secure.

However, as Steven Covey says you have to start with the end in mind. This means that you have to plan NOW to ensure you get out of your business what you need for the future.

If, like me, your business is largely centred on you as an individual your business is unlikely to be worth very much to someone else when you decide to stop. This means that your business needs to earn enough for you to make decent pension contributions now to fund your retirement.

If your business employs other people to deliver the product/service then you may be able to sell your business to realise value when you retire. However, you can only maximise this value if you start to plan several years ahead. It is vital that you can distance yourself from the business and that it can run without you, for example.

Whatever your goals it is never too early to start positioning your business so it is in the best position to meet them. If you don’t, you may find your retirement dreams end in cash strapped nightmares.

Fiona 🙂

Delegation is the key!

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Jenny with bunch of papers
I was talking to a strategic introducer recently –  she is successful in her field but is starting to get bogged down in the day to day running of her business. In particular, administration and bookkeeping are starting to grind and take the shine out of her enjoyment of her businesses.

This is a common story but one that has a simple solution – DELEGATION.

We may have many ‘good’ reasons why delegation is hard and why we should do all the ‘easy’ jobs in our businesses:

– it can be expensive to pay someone else

– perhaps they will do the job wrongly or prove unreliable

– it will take time for them to settle in and the process will be distracting

However, you cannot escape the truth that however much you try to ‘create’ time by managing it better, there will only ever be 24 hours in a day! There will come a point (or you may already be there) where there is simply not enough time to do all that is needed in your business.

So I would answer each of the objections above like this:

– You are much more valuable to your business than you may credit. Your time is likely to be worth much more to your business per hour than the £15-£25 per hour you might need to pay an administrator/bookkeeper.

Also there are jobs which only you can do in your business. These undelegatable jobs include creating business strategy, and leading and managing your business (even if  you work alone your business needs to be managed!). If administration and bookkeeping are keeping you so occupied you do not have time for strategy, or management, then your business will suffer considerably.

– Are you really sure you are the best bookkeeper/administrator anyway! Surely you did not start your own business to play around with the books or to file!

– If you engage a trained bookkeeper they will settle in very quickly. Also, because they already know what to do as a bookkeeper you won’t  have to spend time showing them what to do.

So do yourself a favour. If you have too little time to do the important things in your business – DELEGATE!

Fiona 🙂