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Navigating milestones in your business

Recently a new client of mine prior to our relationship, decided they were ready to hire a new sales employee, and at the same time commit to advertising on a local radio station to promote their business.

It wasn’t a few months later when the sales person was let go, the radio ads were pulled, and they’re still looking to pay off the costs incurred for both decisions, many months later. What happened?

Well, setting milestones for one.

There were other reasons, but I want to point out what should have happened had they managed their decisions by setting milestones. And if that did happen, these two issues, or rather failures wouldn’t have happened. And the business would be in a better position.

The lack of milestones means they didn’t manage their business decisions by looking at their numbers. I can confirm that, because they didn’t have a budget in place, nor did they review their P/L statements. In fact, they didn’t have P/L statements prepared.

Which means they didn’t plan. And they didn’t set any milestones that could have been measured before making these critical mistakes. Numbers tell a story. They don’t lie. Had they planned in advance and decided that “when our revenues hit x, and our sales process and conversion meets y%, we can then be ready to hire our first employee”. Had they suggested, let’s budget x% for marketing, and evaluated the effectiveness of spending 75% of their marketing budget on advertising that doesn’t generate direct responses, they very likey would have identified a less expensive, and more effective choice for spending money on marketing.

These decisions have set the business back. But they’ll overcome it. Because now with our involvement, they are planning, they are budgeting, and they are setting milestones that need to be achieved before making any additions or investments into their business.

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