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How to retire early on a decent income

Most people would like to retire early on a reasonable income that supports their desired lifestyle.

The reality is somewhat different for many, but if you’re running your own business, you are in control of your own destiny more so than most.

All it takes is some careful financial planning, to set out your personal financial goals and how you can run your business to achieve them.

Sounds interesting? Read on…

Not everyone is good at the numbers. But to run a successful business you simply can’t afford to ignore them. By all means leave it to an expert to do the number crunching for you, but do yourself a favour and pay attention to their edited highlights.

For example – do you know how many sales you need to make to break even? How many more sales do you need to increase profitability by 10%? And are your profits being eaten away by a poorly performing product or service?

It’s time to get smart, if you want to retire early!

So, here’s some of the detail…

You need a financial appraisal of your business model, either from your finance director if you have one, or from a reputable outsourced professional.

And this appraisal should include the following:

• A thorough assessment of your business model – what does it do, how does it do it, does it make money, is there potential for it to make more money? Is it losing money unnecessarily?
• An examination of your product or service mix – do they all contribute to profits? Are there other opportunities to increase sales and profits?
• How is cash flow? What can you do to improve it?

At this stage, once you are informed about the financial health of your business, you’re also in a position to make astute business decisions and take action.

And you must set realistic financial targets that are achievable, based on the capabilities of a business model that is running at its optimum level. Then identify strategies needed to achieve those targets

And once this exercise has ironed out inefficiencies and created a profitable business model, you need a financial management system in place to track performance against your targets, so you can monitor progress.

Measuring and monitoring progress is key to identifying where corrective action is needed if you are to stay on course to meet your financial goals. A plan without a gauge is not worth the paper it’s written on. And it’s inevitable, in an ever-changing world, that you will need to adapt your plans to suit the market conditions.

It’s worth noting that this is an ongoing process, and should become part of your monthly, or weekly regime to check figures, sales, profits and how they fare against the realistic results that you’ve established your business is capable of achieving.

Remember – you want to retire early and have a great lifestyle – so the effort you put in to looking after the financial performance of your business now will repay you further down the line.

If you’re keen to take a greater control over the future of you and your business, we can help here at Blaze Ahead.

Julian Portch, an esteemed member of our team operates as a virtual finance director for a number of businesses, adding the financial rigour they need to stay focused on medium and long-term goals through making the right decisions today.

If you’d like to find out more details about this service, please do get in touch. The sooner you act, the better the prospects for you to live life more on your terms!

Alternatively, you could carry on as you are, and hope for the best…

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