Empower your business

If you believe that your business is not efficient enough, and put the available resources to a better use, a process of strengthening might improve your company’s performances:

1. Make a thorough analysis of corporate assets and performances, studying in depth your output and the target market;
2. Try to diagnose what works and what can be improved, identifying in particular your strengths and weaknesses;
3. identify new development strategies for your business, aligning the latter to the new stated goals. Objectives may include: the improvement of products and services offered by the core business; the improvement of sales methods towards target customers; the improvement of marketing strategies for the achievement of target business; improving the degree of business innovation, focusing on how to make your business as state-of-the-art as possible;
4. plan a development plan to implement the set objectives. A practical method might include preparing different tables (even an Excel worksheet might be useful) for each identified strengthening goal, inserting all necessary actions to make the business model in line with the new corporate objectives. For each action enter a detailed description and motivation that will allow you to verify independently the causal link between the action described and the related goal. It might also be useful to prepare a spending budget for every planned action, in order to evaluate also in quantitative terms, the necessary effort to implement the new objectives;
5. prepare a detailed financial plan in order to analyse the necessary financial resources to successfully complete the new development plans. Here are some useful suggestions: use adequately the leverage, utilising as much equity as possible, but without excluding in advance small funding with moderate interest rates, especially should the payment of interest lighten the tax burden if the company’s profit were to be substantial. Prepare a structured and detailed business plan to get a loan, it's very important to be able to communicate your business idea to third parties and to convince investors that your strategy is right. Demonstrate capital soundness and resources and highlight the value of corporate assets;
6. draw up a detailed operating plan, one that’s coherent with your new business goals. A thorough definition of the activities will allow you to prepare the necessary resources for their implementation;
7. prepare budgets, so that you have an idea about the results that your company can reach. In particular, the study of the estimated balance sheet and income statement will become necessary. The balance sheet shows the financial position of the company in a specific period, or how your business resorts to capital funding, and how this is used. The income statement is the budget document which states costs and revenues of the year, giving us a clear measure of the corporate profitability.

Bear in mind that the SUAP, Office for Productive Activities, will be your reference point. You can refer to it for all bureaucratic procedures that you will need to implement your empowerment plan.