Top-Line Growth

3 min. readlast update: 07.25.2023

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Planning for the Top-Line Growth You Need

A strategy pyramid helps you illustrate vision and mission together with your team. Successful organizations vertically align business units with organization-wide strategies and goals. The pyramid provides visual direction. Long-term vision and mission appear at the top. At the foundation, action plans, tactics, and initiatives support. To learn more, read our insights article “Strategy through the Lens of Holistic and Objective-Based Information.”

The Annual Budget Process

As part of ongoing strategy, organizations create budgets. It all starts with top-line growth, the revenue/sales budget. Answering questions such as, “What do we anticipate as revenue for the year?” The budget outlines business expectations for what the company wants to achieve for any given period. Successful management teams monitor and adjust accordingly when new, significant information is known.

Components:

  • Revenue and expense estimates
  • Cash flow expectations
  • Debt management and reduction

Through continuous improvement, businesses review budget-to-actual variances to make proactive operational adjustments throughout the year. The budget should be a part of ongoing management, a living and breathing document. Successful businesses also compare current year to prior year results.

Forecasting

Working in tandem, it’s also important for a business to forecast financials including cash. Whereas a budget depicts the direction management wants to lead the business, a financial forecast helps articulate whether the company is reaching its targets. It helps show the course for where the company is headed in the future.

Cash Flow Management

Cash is presented first on the balance sheet for a reason: It’s the most important asset, or financial resource, to an organization. Management teams need to master cash flow management. Businesses can easily fall into the trap of only looking at the P&L, that’s income statement, budget-to-actual results and lose sight of cash flow expectations. The latter is disastrous for an organization. A slippery slope. Slippery enough that an outside turnaround expert will need to be called upon to work with senior leadership and management. It goes without saying: It’s critical for senior leadership teams to listen to the sound advice of their senior financial leaders. It’s also critical for financial leaders to educate business units, their internal clients, on financial matters that impact them.

Top-Line Growth

Business advisors with both business and financial acumen advise business owners and executives on top-line growth. Through a facilitative and collaborative approach, business advisors and your leadership team:

  • Look at your marketing
  • Review your key marketing drivers
  • Review your key sales drivers
  • Reflect upon the financial impact of the key sales and marketing drivers
  • Prioritize projects with agreed fresh actions

You are then able to focus on the implementation of your growth plans with fresh focus.

The Benefits to You of Focus

Top-line review service is tailored to suit your needs and consists of a series of meetings to match what you want. The service provides you with the following:

  • Fresh focus and feeling more in control
  • Greater awareness of your growth factors
  • Focus upon any areas of opportunity
  • Proactive ideas on growth
  • High-tech interactivity
  • A copy of each meeting
  • A chance to experience how business advisors operate

How a Top-Line Review Service Works

Business advisors help you articulate your ultimate growth aspirations and using an innovative and interactive high-tech approach, look at key areas of growth and that are most important to you.

GROWTH OBJECTIVES

Facilitation of your growth goals and ultimate aims.

GROWTH DRIVERS

Review of your sales and marketing and the impact on growth.

GROWTH IDEAS

Review of what is possible and how to achieve it.

A Successful Future

Whether your business takes a top-down or bottom-up, collaborative approach to budgeting, it’s critical to know your business drivers. Financial management is continuous learning and improvement.

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