Budgets.

[Rupe]

Sure, but if you screwed up less, and had less squads, you might end up with the same money. It depends how much the good ones are balancing the bad, if the good ones didnt have to balance the bad then the % profit could increase.

 

But screwing up pricing comes down to many things, especially weather, so maybe more squads so that there is more good to balance the bad is the best way to go.

[WorcsWuss]

Sure, but if you screwed up less, and had less squads, you might end up with the same money. It depends how much the good ones are balancing the bad, if the good ones didnt have to balance the bad then the % profit could increase.

 

But screwing up pricing comes down to many things, especially weather, so maybe more squads so that there is more good to balance the bad is the best way to go.

 

Spreading the risk Rupe... if you have 10 squads turning over £100k per month, and 1 squad crashes the van on the way home and all end up of work for a month, you lose 10%. If you're one lone squad turning over £10k and crash the van you lose 100% of your turnover. If everyone's making some profit most of the time, there should be enough in the big firm to carry it through the times when they're short handed.

Of course, the flip side is when they've got more labour than work, all that buffer gets swallowed up just paying the wages.

 

It's a choice we make, all businesses are different, there's not realy a right or wrong way.

I would agree though that spending 5% on advertising wouldn't be my preference. I reckon you'd be better off spending that 5% on charity work and getting free coverage in the local press instead.

[Paul Jenks]

How and where you spend your budgets is also dependent on your business objectives.

How many of the businesses/companies on here actually produce a budget forecast for the year along with a cashflow forecast and have monthly management accounts to see how you are doing?

It's pretty straight forward to get proformas for most of these but by god it's dull. Luckily I have someone to do it for me. Adds administrative costs and saves me alot of time and I get a good overview of how we are doing.