Why do businesses often neglect to review and monitor activities? In this episode, we find out why and the detrimental effects it can have on their success. By understanding these reasons and taking action, you can avoid missed opportunities, financial losses, and business failure.

Reasons Behind Neglecting Review and Monitoring

Procrastination: Business owners and managers delay the review and monitoring process due to daily tasks.

Overwhelmed by Daily Operations: Due to day-to-day activities, there is little time available to identify areas for improvement.

Perceiving It as a Numbers Exercise: Some view reviewing as mundane, failing to recognize the valuable insights numbers provide.

Lack of Financial Expertise: Given that small and medium-sized businesses lack dedicated finance teams, it can be daunting to analyze, review and monitor financial data.

Fear of Uncovering Problems:  Some owners avoid facing financial challenges, thereby leaving them vulnerable to surprises and consequences.

Perceived Complexity:  Financial statements and data can seem overwhelming, consequently leading to avoidance.

Taking Action: Embracing Review and Monitoring

Building a Habit: To start with, engage in small, regular review sessions such as analyzing your bank statements on Monday mornings for 15-20 minute

Setting Expectations: Define benchmarks for each review to determine positive or negative results.

Seeking Help:  Moreover, consult your accounting team, explore educational resources, and increase financial literacy.

Conclusion: Discovering Business Success through Review and Monitoring

Taking time to review and monitor business activities is crucial for identifying issues, making informed decisions, and achieving growth. Overcome procrastination, prioritize review amidst daily operations, embrace numbers as insights, seek financial expertise, confront challenges, and simplify complexity to be on your way to discovering your business's full potential.

If you found this episode valuable and insightful, we encourage you to share it with others who can benefit from these valuable tips and strategies. Together, let's empower more businesses for success. Join the 'I Hate Numbers' community, where you can connect with like-minded individuals, gain support, and access resources to conquer financial challenges. Plan it, Do it, Profit!

Running a successful business requires more than just good products and services. You need to regularly review and monitor the various aspects of your business, including the financial ones. However, many businesses, too many, in my opinion, neglect this crucial step, and this can lead to missed opportunities, financial losses, and even at worst case, business failure.

In this week's podcast, I'm going to explore the reasons why businesses often fail to review and monitor their business and financial activities, and provide some practical tips as to how they could start embracing that idea and concept of regular monitoring, regular review, and obviously action as well.

You are listening to the I Hate Numbers Podcast with Mahmood Reza. The I Hate Numbers podcast mission is to help your business survive and thrive by you better understanding and connecting with your numbers. Number love and care is what it's about. Tune in every week. Now, here's your host, Mahmood Reza.

Now, reviewing and monitoring your financial activity, folks, by the way, gives you foresight. Detecting those issues early on, you can nip them in the bud before they become full-blown disasters. Reviewing and monitoring your financial activities tells you whether your progress is following the path you want it to.

If it's not, you can put things right, and if it is, time to give you a celebratory slap on the back and have that drink to celebrate. Diving into your financial data, your business data at early stage gives you valuable insights into your business' performance, and you can make informed decisions. It's like having that crystal ball showing your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities, and allow you to steer your business ship properly.

Let's explore some of the reasons as to why that would happen, and before we continue with that, folks, as a heads up, in the I Hate Numbers Podcast, the mission is to improve your financial awareness, help you and your business, make more money, save tax and time, and give you the business that you aspire to.

Plan it. Do it. Profit. Let's crack on with the podcast. Now, one reason why business owners fail to monitor and review is procrastination. That arch enemy of productivity. Business owners and managers often find themselves caught in the web of daily tasks, constantly pushing off the review and monitoring process until tomorrow.

Ah, tomorrow. Tomorrow turns into next week. Next week turns into next month, and suddenly you've got problems on your hands. Now, a common reason why businesses neglect that review and monitoring process is the day-to-day activities of life, the day-to-day operations, that demand and pull on our times. We often find ourselves getting caught up in the daily grind of managing employees, handling customer inquiries, fulfilling orders, and this is very little time and energy left over for reviewing what's important in our business, let alone identifying those areas that we can improve.

Another reason why businesses fail to engage with the review process is they consider it just another numbers exercise. For some reason, unbeknownst to many others, when people think of numbers, their eyes glaze over, that pencil is grabbed, and that eye gouging takes precedence over the action. Business owners can convince themselves that numbers are nothing more than a bunch of stats, but numbers give you a great story.

They reveal trends, opportunities, potential pitfalls. Another reason that presents a challenge to business owners is the lack of financial expertise they feel they lack. Many small or medium-sized businesses may not have a dedicated finance team. They might not have the resources to have a full-time internal accountant.

So, you need to seek help from those professionals, and also improve your own financial awareness and knowledge. Without that necessary knowledge or guidance, it can be very daunting for a business owner to dive into their financial data and make some sense of it. Jargon may be thrown at you by your accounting team.

You may not understand what's going on under the bonnet of your business, but you need to have an awareness. You need to increase that. Either buying that expertise, cough, cough, give I Hate Numbers a call. Speak to your accountant, but the expertise is there, it’s accessible, and it's important to access that.

Another reason why businesses owners disconnect from the review process is they like to impersonate our favorite bird, the ostrich. They're wary, putting their heads in the sand, wary of uncovering those nuggets. They're afraid that they might get problems that are going to be revealed, which they can't deal with.

Ignorance is bliss, but that's the land where financial problems don't exist. Or do they? The ignorance might seem like a comfortable place to hide, but it's also the perfect breeding ground for financial disasters. If you don't review and if you don't monitor, you are leaving yourself vulnerable to unexpected surprises and, potentially, irreversible consequences.

You need to embrace that, and you need to be resilient and strong, and not put your head in the sand. Those business owners that impersonate that wonderful bird, the ostrich, hope that if they ignore their financial data, the problems will magically disappear. And unfortunately. folks, that is not going to happen.

Avoiding the truth, you miss out those crucial insights that can not only help you make better decisions, but help you deal with those challenges head on. Facing challenges head on, some business owners will find there are solutions. There are problems that aren't as bad as they think they are, but every problem will have a solution behind it.

Ignoring issues only allows them to fester and, potentially, cause much bigger damage later on down the track. So, we have got three good reasons so far. We've talked about procrastination. We've talked about the perception about lack of financial expertise. We’ve talked about fear, putting your head in the sand from wary and scared about revealing problems.

Another common reason provided is the complexity or the perceived complexity. Financial statements, reports, data that's being generated, if it's not your primary skill set, can seem very overwhelming, can seem very daunting, and can seem very inaccessible. Just like procrastination, this can lead to avoidance

and this can lead you to disconnect from the numbers in your business, and that's not a good look. Now, in terms of way forward, folks, here, those are four common reasons put forward for not reviewing. I would add a fifth reason, and that's you may not have the data, you may not have the information to your fingertips to be able to review and have a look at that. If you haven't, that's an easy-to-do fix.

Now, in terms of tips, in terms of things that we can do to improve our ability to review, there are a few things that we can look at. Number one, start to build up a habit. That habit could be literally on a Monday morning, for half an hour, you review your company's bank statements. That's quite an easy task to achieve in the sense of we can access our bank statements online.

We can access what's going on when we upload those statements into our accounting systems. So, reviewing the bank statement to see where we are, such as how much money is in the bank and what's going on, is an easy task. Set yourselves to 15-20 minutes. Review that. Now, when you’re reviewing that, you've got to have a benchmark.

So, what was your expectation what that bank panel was going to look like? And that's one thing you can do. Take the most important things to look at in your business. Is it the level of customer accounts outstanding? Is it the profitability that you're generating in your business? Is it the number of customer inquiries you're dealing with?

Whatever that is, choose that measure and look at it. Get into the habit, either yourself or your staff members, your team to produce that information for you to review and look at. Reviewing something has got to be against the content of an expectation. If you don't have an expectation, how do you know what you're looking at, what content, and if it's good or if it's bad?

If you have a knowledge gap, if there are the terms you don't understand, either speak to your current accounting team, check out our previous podcast, check out our YouTube channel, drop me a line. We've got a bundle of resources there to help you with that translation exercise and increase your financial literacy as well.

So, folks, I hope you found this podcast useful. If you have, I'd love it if you could share it with those who would benefit from that, and until next week, I'll see you on the other side. We hope you enjoyed this episode and appreciate you taking the time to listen to the show. We hope you got some value.

If you did, then we'd love it if you shared the episode. We look forward to you joining us next week for another I Hate Numbers episode.