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How To Make Money In Your Business

Written by: Adam Sonnhalter

Article Overview: The Profit Plan is the answer to how to make money in your business. If you can't plan it out on paper, chances are you won't be able to do it in real time with your hectic business. Pulling together a Profit Plan does a couple of great things for an organization: 1. It Pulls Everyone Together 2. It Allows for Ownership 3. It Prevents Monday Morning Quarterbacks

Free Download - How Do I Find Time To Plan? By Adam Sonnhalter
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How To Make Money In Your Business

The Profit Plan is the answer to how to make money in your business. If you can't plan it out on paper, chances are you won't be able to do it in real time with your hectic business. Both my partner Jack Mencini and I have quite a bit of experience with helping companies that are struggling to make money turn themselves into profitable organizations. Each time, a Profit Plan has been a key component.

What is a Profit Plan? Well it's routinely called a Budget or Forecast by most people. It's a financial projection of your revenue and expenses for the next 12 months. We call it a Profit Plan, because once you subtract all of your expenses from your revenue you should have a profit left over. If not, you need to figure out a way to either increase your sales or reduce your expenses.

What's nice about a profit plan, is that it not only covers the numbers portion of the projection, but also the underlying assumptions. For each line item under revenue and expenses, you should have a written assumption that explains how you've arrived at that figure.

Pulling together a Profit Plan does a couple of great things for an organization:

1. It Pulls Everyone Together: chances are, you as the owner cannot put together a full profit plan without input from some of your people. You'll need to have discussions with each of the key people in your organization to pull it all together. It gets all the key players in your organization focused on the future which is where you can make changes and have an impact.

2. It Allows For Ownership: everyone in your organization can be assigned responsibility for one or several lines in the Profit Plan. For instance, you can nominate someone as the Utility Czar for your organization and her job is to make sure that your Utility expenses meet or beat the projected figure.

3. It Prevents Monday Morning Quarterbacks: that's the phrase used when people analyze football games the day after and second guess decisions made during the heat of battle. Usually it's someone on the outside of the organization who plays this role. If you have all the key people on your team involved in the planning process, they have to each sign off on the plan. The fact that things are written down prevents them from going back and rewriting history.

The first year is always the hardest because you'll be starting from scratch. Each successive year gets easier because you can now build on prior year's experiences.

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About the Author: Adam Sonnhalter
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Adam Sonnhalter is a Partner of Maximum Value Partners, a business coaching firm based in Northeast Ohio that works with companies across the U.S. with anywhere from 1-25 employees. Adam has been involved in professional services his entire career including nearly a decade on Wall Street as an Investment Banker helping people buy and sell companies as well as raise money for their companies. Adam grew up with an entrepreneur at the dinner table and has been advising business owners for well over a decade. Adam's partner in MVP is Jack Mencini. Jack has personally owned and operated several companies, 5 of which he bought and subsequently sold, the others were started from scratch, including MVP and one that made the Weatherhead 100 list of fastest growing companies in Northeast Ohio. All of this came after 17 years working for a couple of large public companies in Northeast Ohio that exposed him to business throughout the world. We currently work with companies throughout the U.S. either in person or virtually. More information is available about Adam and Jack and their business coaching at the MVP web site www.maximumvp.com and their blog www.AskTheBizCoaches.com .

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