I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and any other holiday or special event celebrated this time of year.

I had a conversation with a prominent consultant in the accounting industry regarding best management practices for high growth business. This is a very timely topic for the first newsletter of 2016, as everyone in business should be considering how to make the new year more profitable than the last. While the conversation initially centered on accounting software, it quickly became clear the focus really revolved around systems and processes. Here are a few of the observations we discussed during our conversation.

The best software in the world (of course that means software from Red Wing Software) can’t fix broken processes. A business needs to identify what is important to them for analysis purposes, and then implement a system that provides that information. That may mean changing some internal processes, so data that is being collected is sufficient to get the results they’re after. Change in process is always a difficult thing to implement, but may be necessary to accomplish an ultimate goal. The way to make a change successful is to make the process as easy as possible for people to understand, inform them of the importance of the information, how it will be used (share results), and then enforce implementation. It normally takes sticking to a new daily routine for just a couple of weeks for it to become habit.

I know many people reading this newsletter have great systems in place already, and have coworkers that would argue that there is no better way to do things. I would argue that any time we start to believe that our business can’t improve each and every thing that it does, the business stops growing, and we all know that without growth the business will fade away. I challenge everyone to take a look at what you’re doing today, tweak something that will make your business better, and reap the rewards. Here’s to a successful, different, and more profitable 2016.

- Ken Hilton, President