Why do a Small Business audit.

If your wondering how to put your start-up with a small Business audit to the next level this is the blog for you.

Why do a small Business audit?

We’ve discussed the importance of creating a robust small Business strategy to encourage growth and profit.

There is a huge dynamic environment that affects everything you do. It is important to have optimal control of your start-up’s internal environment so you can  influence & change your external environment’s conditions for your side business to become a thriving beast it should be. This is how a small Business audit does just that.

Creating and operating a business should be treated like you are going to war so that you are able to provide a better tomorrow for the people you love and to establish a legacy that will echo your name when your gone.

Let’s assume you have established your Facebook page, website and kicked off your shop in the middle of town if need be. With the right plan in place you would be thriving at the start but after a while you will attract competition and the battle for supremacy in the marketing environment gets interesting.

In order to get to the point, you need to hear this story

The next point is based on a calendar printing business that kicked off in the 1980’s. Being the only calendar printing business in Masterton was pretty awesome and brought in a lot of cash, one year on there were 8 more other businesses that were offering something similar and forced this calendar printing business to diversify into other areas such as printing t-shirts, mass reproduction of documents and computer services ect. After 5 years of operation, this business folded.

It wasn’t the fact that this business operated a budget service, this business was highly respected in town and the owner was competing with multimillionaires and outlasted most of them. The conditions in the marketplace was good, however with a small Business audit it could have been a lot better and here is why.

The calendar printing business had a lot of issues and one major issue was the fact that he operated his business on the one business plan that he started off with. Let alone this business was well over 10 years old before folding, it is a work of a miracle that it lasted this long.

A business plan should be treated like a battle plan and you’re the fucking general getting ready to take your share of the market, and the market is a huge battle field full of opportunity that you must take.

Like a general you look at the battlefield to assess if your army is up for the task, in this case your army is your side-hustle & your business. Ask yourself! Is your army in the best shape to influence the battlefield in your favour?

This is where the internal audits being the social media / website / SEO or business plan audit come into play.

They are a great small Business audit tool to see how your business can measure up against the odds. For example, your Facebook page will perform well under certain conditions, are you speaking your readers language? Your reach, comments and likes will tell you. What type of content is attractive to the reader? Do you take note of popular posts and able to gauge what type of posts are great to post & what type of posts loses the audience?

Do you regularly look for issues that affect your reach, conversions & engagements and put in place a plan to mitigate these issues every month?

This is what an audit does. The right structured audit can identify hidden issues so you can develop a solution that will encourage growth and help you avoid pitfalls that can devastate your ability to take that vital market share.

Why do an audit you ask?

There may be hidden issues affecting your business performance and capabilities such as

Expenditure rates

Employee performance

Poor site SEO

Site structure not compliant

Distribution methods slow to push promotion

Business and marketing plans out of date.

And remember that you are not the only General fighting for this slice of the battlefield and the terrain you fight in is everchanging, so you must revise redevelop your plan, strategies and tactics to stay adaptive in this forever changing market place.

A change in legislation can change the way you conduct business,

A change in the social media algorithm can change your reach and presence,

A change in your audiences attitudes & perceptions regarding your offer &,

Your competitor offering a discount to a relative service that you offer.

These are some of the changes that some business owners encounter quite often.

So it is important to audit internal factors affecting your Business capability and performance so you can  take on  the competition onslaught, no matter what they throw at you.

That way you will be in a much better place to influence the external factors and create better conditions for you to win on the battlefield.