On this episode of ClearTalk, our President, Joel Harris, is once again joined by Eric Morris, CFO at Wayne Automatic for PART 2 of this discussion on why budgeting is important for the success of your integration business. 

The pair also covers many best practices for using your budget as a tool throughout the year, as opposed to creating a budget and putting it on the shelf.

It may be a bit cliché, but they say that when you set goals, they need to be SMART, and it’s the same thing with your budget. Your budget needs to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time Centered.” Eric Morris

Our experts answer many important questions including:
- Why should you always be challenging your assumptions?
- How can an integration company build a revenue budget?
- Why is it important to triangulate your work against as many data points as possible
- Why you need to schedule budget review meetings

“Remember, budgeting is an iterative process, and nobody gets it right. We just keep after it and get a little bit better each time,” says Morris. “My company, like everyone else, still has a lot to learn, but we hope we get better with each turn of the crank.”

It’s important to be precise in your assumptions.

If you want to increase gross profits, how are you going to accomplish that?

Optimism is good, but slogans, like Buy Better, don’t help you increase gross profits. “You can’t assume that we can just magically work really hard so our gross margin will increase, and, by golly, we’re going to do better next year,” Morris reports. “You have to be realistic and keep challenging the assumptions.”

Our goal is that when you walk away from this podcast you will create a SMART budget for your integration business. “Because if you don't manage your business differently, the results are not going to be different,” says Harris.

Listen to Part One of this podcast – ClearTalk 25: 4 Reasons Why You Should Have a Budget for Your Integration Business