Know your numbers - Drilling down on your margins

Anna Stubbs • May 31, 2023

Gains can always be made at the margins. These small incremental gains over a month or a year can have a significant impact on your bottom line. This could be additional profit you make from a single project, a single product or service, a particular geographic area, or a certain type of customer.



Drilling down into your sales and margins gives you great insight into which parts of your business are performing well and which ones need improvement.

Some ideas to help you measure your margins:


1. Use real time and up to date data.
Ideally, use a cloud-based accounting system with daily data feeds from your bank.


2. Determine which ways you want to ‘dissect’ your sales.
E.g. by product or service line, by groups of products, by salespeople, or by region. A region could be defined as online sales versus shop sales.


3. Capture sales by these categories at the time of sale or invoicing.
Adjust your account codes accordingly or use reference fields.


4. Capture the direct costs of these sales by using an inventory or time recording system.
If you’re selling a mixture of labour and materials, make sure you correctly capture both the labour and the material costs.


5. Compare the actual results you are getting with your month by month budget.
Do this at least on a monthly basis.


6. Compare your results with industry expectations.
Consider accessing benchmark statistics from your industry or, better still, get together regularly with similar types of businesses to compare your results. These could be identical non-competing businesses in different locations (meet online) or industry-related businesses in your own region.


7. Seek feedback from us as to how you can improve your reporting of your margins.
We come into contact with many businesses like yours and are familiar with best practice, as well as what doesn’t work!


The first step in improving your results is understanding exactly where you are right now – warts and all. Talk to us about how to drill down into your margins.


"You can't manage what you can't measure." - Peter Drucker

Grow your numbers – Increase leads generated

By Anna Stubbs • June 3, 2025
No one can deny that to grow your business, you must attract new potential customers (or leads). It’s how you generate these leads that’s important though. STEP is a lead generation acronym to help you generate quality leads without pointlessly blowing your marketing budget: S = Strategy T = Target E = Efficiency P = Process

Grow your numbers - Reporting and accountability

By Anna Stubbs • June 3, 2025
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential to measure the performance of your business in order to grow your numbers. Of course, the measures themselves are pointless unless there’s reflection and discussion to ensure they’re met. Here’s a simple and effective way to link KPIs to a reporting and accountability framework. Firstly, make sure there is ONE leader for each of the departments in your business: Director, Leadership, Product / Service Development, Operations, Marketing, Sales, Finance, HR, and Admin / IT. One person can lead more than one department, but two people can’t lead one department. You can also contract out departments to avoid needing a large head count of team memebrs (finance, marketing and IT can be outsourced relatively easily). Be clear on who reports to who . One person can only manage 5 or so people effectively. Consider establishing teams with team leaders to enable you to achieve a ratio under 6 to 1. Set up regular department meetings . This may be the CEO with each of the other department heads, the Operations Leader with the Operations team (if less than 5 in the Operations team) or with the Operations Team Leaders (if more than 5 in the Operations team).

Grow your numbers – Control overhead expenses

By Anna Stubbs • June 3, 2025
One of the simplest ways to grow your bottom line is to tighten your belt and spend less.