Bridging Your Business

Growth in revenue and growth in profit is what almost all companies intend to show in their forecasts but every Salesman, Product Manager, COO, CFO and CEO should fully understand the impact and relevance of sales/profit erosion factors and about the real growth opportunities. Change is a prerequisite for success, however, it is important that you first define the successful and differentiating factors of your company before you initiate actions. The increase necessary to achieve this year’s goal is more than simply the difference between this year and last as you can see in the graphs below. Having a full understanding which factors play an important role in your growth scenario is an absolute necessity! Bridging Your Business is not only a systematic method of analyzing the gap between previous periods’ results, targets or budgets and current achievements but it is also a tool to use as an efficient graphical scheme to communicate with all team members involved about the variances between actual and targets. Getting a common agreed upon and full understanding of your business results and about the subsequent strategies and tactics can sometimes be painful but remember: worrying about what’s right is always more important than worrying about who’s right! Regular, systematic and detailed reviews are crucial for any successful operation based on a single set of reliable numbers derived from a system used by all functions within the organization, which provides the source data used for budgeting, planning, reporting and all kind of business analysis to generate subsequent actions. Bridging Your Business is a process that provides a clear overview on actionable items within a whole business process. Larger issues have to be cut into smaller pieces in order to see the relevance and to identify appropriate actions. This new and unpredictable world requires a high level of alertness and understanding of your business to monitor which part of the business meets your standards and provides new opportunities and which products, services and customers need to be reinvented. Bridging Your Business is a fast and efficient tool to help better understanding your business and to allocate costly and scares resources in the most efficient and most effective way. Using the methodology, an analysis can be made not only for the overall Sales results between two periods but also in more detailed level like for: Customers, Market Segments, Countries or Regions, Product Groups and individual product part numbers. Next to a detailed Sales Analysis between two periods the same analysis can be made for Standard Margin, EBITDA and other criteria. The book Bridging Your Business guides you through the entire process and calculations to enable you to create a detailed Bridge between two predefined periods.