As you are reading this, you might take a look at how many days are left in 2013. Hopefully, you as the owner have met with your management team and are wrapping up the team’s final budget for 2014. By having worked with your team to achieve the 2014 budget, all members of the team “own” the budget. By having done this, you and the team now have the ability to bring accountability to the goals that the company needs to achieve in 2014.
I would like to use a budgeted dollar volume of $1.2 million as an example for your proposed budget for next year. The reason being is that it allows us to talk about each month needing sales of $100,000 to come to fruition. It also allows us to use easy-to-understand percentage costs of doing business. So let’s start with sales as the first example of holding a person responsible for a goal.