<\/a><\/p>\n Small businesses make up the vast majority of business numbers, make a huge contribution to economic activity and health, but most do not last 5 years.<\/p>\n Over\u00a0 20 years of observing small businesses as a contractor and consultant, I have seen a modest number of factors that the successful businesses, those that last the distance and deliver good financial returns over an extended period, \u00a0set out to manage in a very deliberate way.<\/p>\n None of this is easy, or comfortable, but as I look around at successful SME’s, they are all employing at least 5 or 6 of these strategies.\u00a0 I would recommend that you do a relatively simple assessment of each parameter, measure yourself, and use that measure to identify areas to target for improvement. Simple spider graphs are very useful as a visual tool for recording progress.<\/p>\n Happy to have a yarn with you about how an outside resource may be able to assist the process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Small businesses make up the vast majority of business numbers, make a huge contribution to economic activity and health, but most do not last 5 years. Over\u00a0 20 years of observing small businesses as a contractor and consultant, I have seen a modest number of factors that the successful businesses, those that last the distance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8780,57258971,7885,57258965,10585],"tags":[16995,393245,140198,16505,57258968,57258963,2267523,56490,8553],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fjXq-1kM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5132"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5132"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5138,"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5132\/revisions\/5138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n