As a tax professional and an entrepreneur, it’s always interesting to me to see the difference in the way many of us are wired to think about our businesses and our results. 

As an industry, we’re an incredibly conservative group of people, but as an entrepreneur, I really can’t afford to be.  Case in point:  growth. 

Tax preparation and guidance is based on looking at past performance, while entrepreneurship is based on looking forward towards what can happen.  Sometimes, those two philosophies are tough to reconcile.  Here’s the thing, though:  as a business owner, you can’t get lost in what has already happened. 

Should it guide you?

Yes.

Should it rule you? 

No. 

Think of the last two years – lockdowns, the pandemic, staffing and supply chain issues, and of course, this year, record inflation. 

There’s not a lot of long-term data to guide you in your business, especially if, like so many other small businesses, you were actively tweaking and modifying your business to stay open and profitable in the pandemic. 

Neither your business nor the economy looks like it did last year.  For that matter, last quarter. 

What you can do, though, is to do the right things at the right time. 

Keep your bookkeeping up to date. 

Keep your quarterly taxes paid and sorted. 

…And don’t be afraid to think actively about how you can refine your business.   Today, I want you to think about some of the things you do every day and how, if you didn’t have to do them, what you could do in their place.

·         Paying invoices

·         Training new hires

·         Lead generation

·         Lead conversions

·         Accounts receivable

If you tracked the time you spend doing just these tasks in your business, I’ll bet you’d find it was countless hours each week. 

Imagine if you simply spent time developing systems that handle all or part of those…

Invoices could be sent automatically.  50-75% of your new hire training was automatic, not “on the job.”

You developed a process that seamlessly found and moved interested prospects into a sales process that required, let’s say, an hour of your time instead of 3-5. 

What would your day look like if you could do these things? 

More importantly, these systems, while they’d save you considerable time, they’d also allow you to look and analyze your business performance far faster and easier that you can right now, don’t you think? 

That’s the bigger point in all this:  you CAN listen to us tax professionals, but you can also refine your business and create more time in it, which will allow you to bring more creativity and growth to bear, no matter what the past performance was, or how last year looked.