Answering these questions could provide valuable strategic insights
Building your business so that one day you can sell it and deliver yourself a euphoric exit event begins with asking and answering insightful questions today. The questions you should be asking as Q1 has just completed will have you discussing the right topics with your team and gaining valuable insights to help you build company worth.
Here a just a few typical questions that an owner/CEO should be getting answers to at the end of any quarter:
- What products/services in our portfolio helped pull up our financial results and which ones pulled them down? This comparison should be done to the budget and to prior periods such as prior quarter or prior year. Don’t just look at your consolidated numbers, look at performance by products/services in your portfolio.
- How did each of your served market sectors perform, which ones pulled up your financial performance and which ones may have pulled it down?
- Did your revenue growth accelerate, flatten, decelerate or decline versus prior periods and are you clear on the reasons?
- What was your productivity in the quarter – did your team deliver more outputs with fewer inputs or did the required inputs grow at a faster rate than the outputs?
- Did you build company worth in the quarter by making progress in the non-financial aspects of your business that will one day contribute to the valuation an acquirer places on your business?
- What is your revenue and margin forecast (by product/service) for the balance of the year and does it show that you need to rethink any of your plans/actions/investments that you built into your budget for the next 9 months of the year?
- Were there any new situational awareness learnings that indicate to you that your business could face a future disruption (i.e.: from a competitor or an advancing technology) or that could provide you an opportunity to be a disrupter in your industry?
These are just a few typical questions that an owner/CEO should be asking at the end of a quarter. Meet with the key leaders on your team and use these to facilitate healthy, strategic dialog. Doing so today can have you identifying steps you could be taking to build the future worth of your business.
