Caracus - or what! Do you know your numbers like Apprentice Jim did?
Monday, 18 July 2011 08:12 | 
Written by Vanessa Lanham-Day | 
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What are we going to do on a Wednesday night now that the Apprentice has finished for the season? All that perfect blogging material lost to us!
Let’s be honest – they were priceless. Literally.
I wrote a blog a few weeks back about ‘really needing to know the numbers in your business' – and Jim’s blunder with the basic numbers for ‘Caracus’ proved the point perfectly. They didn’t know the basics...
- The cost of making their products
- How many they expected to sell over a busy lunch time
- What their likely profit would be
And it wasn’t just that they didn’t know the financial facts – they hadn’t even considered this when developing their brand, the products, the shop setting. They were so carried away with their ‘concept’ that the detail of ‘ the money’ simply got forgotten.
But, in truth, is this so very far from reality? Most business people I know couldn’t tell you what profit they made last month or last week? And they’ll give you lots of very good reasons why this is really difficult to do – operational issues, problems with checking stock levels, time, staff – you name it. But the fact remains; do you imagine that lord Sugar doesn’t know the numbers in his business? And he has many.
There are three critical numbers that all business people should know ...
- Your big picture numbers – where is it all heading in the next 6, 12 or 36 months? Turnover? Profit?
- How much did you make last month? So you need to know your sales and your costs of sales.
- And the ROI of your marketing. If you know what’s working – REALLY working – you can invest more money in it, and less on what’s not! To do this you need to have the right tools in place to track effectiveness – which means doing the right ground work up front.
Keeping on top of the numbers takes effort of course – but the reward is being in absolute control of your business – and not looking an utter numpty – like Jim did – when asked the basics about your business.
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