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The year is winding down! While you may be losing some steam and wanting to coast through the rest of the year, it is important to end the year on a strong note and we are here to guide you through it. With over 13 years of experience managing a professional services firm, Heather Kourcklas, President and Founder of Golden Gait Accounting and Consulting, LLC (Golden Gait, LLC), is here to share her proven and timely strategies to help you set yourself up for success in the new year.
But first, let us take a step back
In a webinar earlier this year, Heather shared her re-engineering method that breaks your business down to build it up through operational improvements. Using first-hand experience and tried and true advice, the webinar outlined not only how to identify and spot operational efficiencies, but how to fix them for company-wide success and continued growth.
During the webinar, Heather talked about 5 key areas that would help improve your firm’s bottom line. As a refresher, they are:
- Identify the key elements in your change management plan
- Understand the cost/benefit ratio and impact to the bottom line of the change management project you want you implement
- Create a plan that consists of phases, milestones, activities, and tasks.
- Establish deadlines, assign roles and responsibilities, and monitor results and progress
- Facilitate a team atmosphere through interaction and communication
Go watch and learn Heather’s helpful advice during the webinar recording: “Re-engineering Your Firm: How to Audit Your Operations for a Healthier Bottom Line”
Don’t have time to watch the full webinar? Read our webinar recap blog:
How To: Spotting Operational Inefficiencies Within & Across Departments
It is important to note that whether you have gone through a re-engineering process or not, you should prepare for year-end and plan for the upcoming year. Even without major changes to your firm’s internal operations, planning and doing thought-provoking work at the end of the year is still a must for any business to be operationally and financially successful — which brings us to Part 2.
Looking towards the future
Heather recently joined us again in a new webinar where we took a deeper dive into the financial side of your firm’s operations. In this webinar, we began with where you are now, then looked at the important financial data to collect and analyze from your YTD Q3 results. Then, building off those insights, we guided you on how to:
- Revisit your Q4 budget finalize your estimated and 2021 YTD results
- Tax plan now to reduce stress at the end of the year
- Strategize for the upcoming year
A sneak peek at preparing and analyzing YTD Q3 results
The end of the 3rd quarter is the place where you should be able to see how the rest of the year is going to turn out — Q4 is already laid out by the work that has been accomplished in the first 3 quarters of the year, most of the new customer work has already been achieved, and any additional new work that starts in Q4 has been identified. Internal projects might be in the last phase and 2022 projects are being discussed and hopefully planned.
Solid financial data will provide you with the insight that you need to understand where your business has been and where it is headed. Throughout the webinar, Heather walked through what you must have in place to accomplish this!
But wait, there’s more!
By the time you obtain the financial results of YTD Q3, it will most likely be mid-October which is already 1/6 of the way into the last 3 months of the year. As we mentioned above, you should have a good understanding of what is going to happen the rest of the year based on where you are “today”.
Watch the webinar recording here to learn how to build off this knowledge to finalize your Q4 estimates, end of year tax planning, and thinking ahead to 2022.
