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It’s Time for Your Annual Corporate Check-Up!

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Fall is in the air. Which means that it’s time for football…falling leaves…and your annual corporate check-up. What exactly is a corporate check-up? It’s a chance to review what took place over the past year, take a hard look at actual versus plan, assess your company’s overall health, and get ready to start planning for the next fiscal year.

How do you conduct a corporate check-up?

Schedule a meeting with senior management, including your company’s CEO, COO, CFO and VP Marketing/Sales. Distribute copies of this year’s strategic business plan (you do have an annual strategic business plan, right?), and have a frank discussion about the following:

• Did you achieve the goals that you laid out in your plan? Why or why not?
•Did your implementation plan turn out to be workable and realistic? If not, what happened that you did not anticipate?
•Did new, unforeseen opportunities arise? If so, did you succeed in taking advantage of them? Why or why not?
•Did you have the right employees to allow your company to succeed?
•Did you have the necessary working capital to grow and thrive? Where do things stand now?
•How strong were your relationships with your major vendors? Where do these relationships stand now?
•How solid were your business processes and IT systems? Did any issues arise?
•Were you able to provide formatted financial reports that everyone from senior management to outside lenders understood and had confidence in?
•Did you make use of weekly dashboards to more effectively manage your business?

The answers to these questions will help you assess the business’ health and inform your strategic business plan for next year. In analyzing the answers, pay close attention to patterns in the things that the company seems to be doing right and areas in which you need to improve. What are the underlying causes of the problems you faced? For example, if you did not have the right employees, what areas did this impact?

Why is an annual corporate check-up so important?

Of course, since conducting an annual corporate check-up takes time and effort, you may be tempted to skip it. Don’t give in to this temptation! This exercise gives the entire team a chance to step back, take a “big picture” look at what’s been going on, and see things that aren’t always obvious when you’re enmeshed in the day-to-day challenge of running a business.

Want to bring in an outside expert to provide a fresh point of view in the corporate check-up process? Give me a call. As a part-time CFO, this is one of the many services that I provide.



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