As another New Year approaches, many minds turn to the clean slate of January, and the resolutions we might make for the next 12 months. For lots of us, these will involve healthy eating, healthier habits, and significantly more time at the gym.

But just as you might take this opportunity to get yourself fighting fit, you can also do the same for your business.

If you’ve spent all year working hard, and still don’t feel in shape financially, here’s how you can change up your habits and make it a better 2023.

1) Set yourself goals

You wouldn’t embark on a new exercise regime without having some kind of goal in mind, and the same applies to reinvigorating your practice.

Setting budgets for both your business and personal life is an important step towards overall fitness and helps you to manage yourself more effectively. This is especially the case now that the cost of everything is rising, with businesses being affected by higher energy bills and pressure to increase wages in order to keep staff on board.

A personal budget review will help you to find structure in your personal finances, identifying what you need to draw each quarter to support your lifestyle, while also including enough flexibility to access money you might need for projects like home improvements.

For your business, we can help you prepare a plan for the year ahead, looking at both income and expenditure. A key part of this is thinking of your goals: where you want to be in 12 months’ – or even three years’ – time. With this in mind, we can work backwards to break this into smaller monthly targets (just as you would with incremental steps in the Couch to 5K). In this, you can include targets for your income, which can help spearhead your strategy.

2) Track your progress

And of course, once those monthly goals are in place, you can monitor your progress against them. This means tracking your performance for each month against your budget (rather like the financial equivalent of using a fitness tracker) and looking at the variance: the difference between the two. This will enable you to stay on top of your figures and more quickly probe into any that fall behind.

As the year progresses, this information can be used to create a forecast, which is a blend of your ‘actuals’ (the actual figures for each month) with the budget, creating a bigger picture of how you’re doing and how likely you are to reach your goals.

3) Make it a regular habit

As anybody who’s adopted a new fitness programme knows, the secret to success is regularity. This means committing yourself to good habits, and staying on top of them until they become second nature.

For practice owners, accurate bookkeeping is one of the best things to embrace in your routine. Up to date books give you access to real-time information about how your practice is performing, which can in turn guide your decisions and help you to seize opportunities.

You can also make life far easier for yourself by incorporating healthy habits into your everyday life. For instance, ensuring that you have a separate bank account and credit card for your business, so that any business expenses are kept entirely separate from your personal account. Not only does this keep things tidy and reduce work in the long run, but it also makes your ongoing figures more accurate.

4) Take a holistic view

Having a plan gives you good visibility around your current cost base, and how much tiny tweaks within this will affect the bottom line. However, with so much changing, there’s a real possibility that the minute gains you’re able to wangle on costs will be absorbed by rises in other costs, tax and National Insurance; leaving the distinctly bitter possibility that you could end up slogging away all year for very little extra.

This is therefore where you need to think smart. We’re not saying that you shouldn’t try to tackle costs – there’s no denying that this is a sensible thing to do. But as a practice owner, you should ideally be focusing your energy in the right areas.

Instead of becoming fixated on improving your running time by fractions of seconds, try to take a more holistic view of your overall health and wellbeing. Are you in good condition? Is every part of your body (or here, your business) working as it should be? You’ll be better served by concentrating on driving income up to maintain profit, rather than making small cuts.

5) Bring in support

When things plateau in your progress, or you’re not getting the results you’re looking for, it’s time for a session with your personal trainer. Sitting down with your accountant and having a proper conversation about your finances can often be the first step towards breaking through a wall.

Because as valuable as numbers are, they’re only useful if you know what they really mean. Our accountancy team can work with you to create management accounts, which give a useful overview of your financials with actionable intelligence around them. And, for any of those areas that don’t seem right, our consultants can objectively review your performance and dig to uncover the deeper reasons for any issues, such as inefficiencies or overstaffing.

If you’d like help getting your business in shape (with no leggings involved), get in touch with our team.