Management Tools for Small Businesses

Are you planning for your company's future and not just spending your day putting out fires? Are you addressing and managing change in your industry?

The MI-SBTDC has carefully selected management tools to fit the increasingly complex needs of your small business. Our trainings and services focus on building an action plan, financial management, and marketing. Among these are:

Fiscal Fitness
The purpose of Fiscal Fitness is to assist business owners to understand and utilize financial information to change and grow their company. Fiscal Fitness instructs business owners, step by step, through the process of how to:

• Use financial statements and ratios to track business performance, including benchmarking to industry norms 
• Create a breakeven analysis and use it in pricing, volume and profitability
• Develop and use a budget for cash flow forecasting
• Understand the impact of rapid growth on cash needs of the business
• Make good decisions regarding the amount of bank financing they need

The ideal participant in Fiscal Fitness will have 2-3 years of financial history, pursuing financing, challenges with cash flow or selling their business.

Marketing Upgrade
The Marketing Budget provides you with a tool to determine your company's marketing mix, monthly marketing expenditures, and a credible method for projecting company revenue by month. The tool consists of a CD with a spreadsheet and walk-through presentation, and a book of instructions and case studies.

Market Research
The underlying success for your business is information - including the size and characteristics of your industry, the marketplace, competition, foreign trade, and customer demographics. In addition to local resources, the MI-SBTDC statewide network provides a full range of information services through the Seidman College of Business.

PeerSpectives®
The Michigan PeerSpectives Network brings groups of eight to twelve qualified entrepreneurs together ten times a year for collaborative sessions addressing important business issues. Owners, CEOs and presidents share their management challenges and problem-solving ideas through confidential and structured roundtables led by a trained facilitator. Peer group members discuss ways to overcome obstacles in growth areas such as finance, employee relations, legal compliance, marketing, and advertising. Facilitators are trained by the Edward Lowe Foundation, a non-profit operating foundation committed to providing assistance to business owners seeking rapid growth for their established businesses. Click here for more information about PeerSpectives.

Strategic Needs Assessment (SNA)
This assessment helps you, small business owners and managers, identify priorities and action strategies to evaluate your company in such areas as management vision, finance, marketing, human resources, operations, and information technology. Your employees complete a short survey and you will have a deeper understanding of their perceptions of the company and its organization. The SNA provides:

• A better understanding of your company's current condition
• A comparison that shows how key people view opportunities and challenges
• Insights into the real issues facing your company
• Feedback to help you and your team concentrate on priorities and action strategies

Strategic Actioning
The Strategy Matrix®, designed by Joel Barker, is a simple, group facilitated discussion process allowing your business to quickly evaluate proposed strategic initiatives against current goals and culture of your organization. It is a quantitative tool for exploring the impacts of initiatives and prioritizing those initiatives for organization. The MI-SBTDC network provides Strategy Matrix® facilitation statewide.  

Strategic Problem Solving
The Implications Wheel® by Joel Barker is a decision enhancing tool helping your organization identify and evaluate short and long-term implications for the outcomes of a specific decision or change. The Implications Wheel® is an effective way to identify potential unidentified consequences of initiating a new policy, introducing a new product, or implementing a major change within your company. The systematic and graphic process provides a structured tool which yields far more information about the potential outcomes of a decision.