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The Square Orange Blog

NOW Is The Time To Plan Ahead

It's the end of another financial year and the start of a new one. Now is the perfect time to plan ahead and set out your strategies for next year. Now is the time to write your business plan, even if you haven't done it before, because I will give you a methodology that you can follow in a step-by-step process to write your business plan. But first, let's deal with one of the most frequently asked questions I get from small business owners about business planning: "But I only have a small business - do I really need to prepare a business plan?" My wholehearted answer is always "Yes, Yes and Yes!" (more…)...
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Tax Time 2022!

What’s next on the agenda for the government?

With the election campaign finally over and a new government has been sworn in, many Australians will be wondering what a Labor government is likely to tackle over the next term. A helpful starting point is Labor’s election promises, which provide a useful indication of possible areas that will be targeted over the next few years. (more…)...
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How Is My Business Performing?

As a small business owner, you will know about Profit & Loss Statements and Balance Sheets. They tell you about your business profitability and net assets. You can see, from one period to another, whether you are making more profits than before, or less. They are the start to giving you information about the performance of your business, and hopefully leading you to create strategies to improve profitability and to increase wealth. However, they have their limitations. For a start, they are historic. They give you the bigger picture, but unless you analyse them, they fail to break it down into the component parts. Where is the profit coming from, or where is it not? How solvent are you and what's up ahead? That's why it's important to dig deeper and put some attention to key financial ratios. (more…)...
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Be Focused In Your Marketing

All small business owners want more sales! Yet, not many small business owners think about how they get those extra sales - about their marketing - in any serious, consistent manner. Their growth is usually through a number of unrelated factors such as excellent service resulting in referrals, unique products or services filling a vacuum, a market devoid of good competition, even luck. From time to time, they may find themselves in a quiet period so they "do some marketing" by calling clients they haven't heard from in a while, putting an advertisement in the newspaper or a trade journal, advertising a "Black Friday sale", or sending out leaflets in the hope that someone reading it might come in. Then, for whatever reason (other than by accident that such unfocused and inconsistent marketing is actually working) the business picks up again, and the need for marketing is forgotten. The problem with this inconsistency is that you are not in control of channelling consistent growth. (more…)...
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OTS Management