Profit Optimiser

Professional Planner has entered into a joint venture with Strategic Consulting and Training (SCAT) which will give you free online access to business benchmarking tool Dashboard for a limited period of time.

Undertaking a performance measurement on a regular basis can help you to make informed decisions about the future of your business, and potentially increase your profits.

Dashboard provides financial institutions, dealer groups and planning practices with vital performance information and specific growth recommendations, allowing users to identify the areas of the business that offer the greatest opportunities to improve performance and profitability.

It also shows you the characteristics of high-profit firms and provides comparisons to those firms in key performance areas.

The joint venture will give you access to Scenario Planner, a scaled-down version of the full Dashboard offering.

The tool will only be available free of charge for a three-month period, until December, 2008.

To register, click here

Dashboard measures four key areas of the business: sales, structure, clients and profitability.These measures are then combined to produce a Dashboard Score and Value to allow you to see the difference that various scenario changes can make to your business. The score and value are of course, only for your own internal comparative purposes.

Dashboard Score and Value
	Your Results	Average	High Profit
Summary
Income	96	92	92
Profit	72	92	100
Clients	72	52	56
Structure	52	64	72
Dashboard Score (out of 100)	73	75	80
Dashboard Value	$1,423,230	$1,317,144	$3,855,663

 

Your practice’s data is compared against the average of planning firms with current data in the database, as well as against the average of the top 25 per cent of firms based on net profit, after allowing a notional salary for working owners.

“There are four key areas that we focus on: sales performance of the business, profitability performance of the business, performance in working with the clients and the performance of the structure,” says Jim Stackpool, managing director of SCAT.

{sidebar id=13}“Unlike managed funds, we try to look at each of those four areas independently and then add them up to one main number.”

Without a formal and comparative analysis of a planning firm’s performance, Stackpool says it is impossible for that firm to tell whether it is operating a sustainable business.

“The industry to date has primarily been one in which people have built fairly good jobs for themselves, but very few have built good businesses for themselves,” he says.

“To build a business to be what we call ‘successful on purpose’ in key areas, it’s crucial that we understand where the business’s strengths are based on performance numbers as compared to the ability of the individual at the top of the firm. That transition from, ‘I have a client base to sell’ to ‘I have a business to sell’, can’t happen without knowing the numbers.”

Through the joint venture, we hope to provide you with a useful snapshot of where your business stands today, highlighting your strengths and weaknesses relative to your peers.