The Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Business Monday Executive Forum asked several business owners some tough questions: How did your business fare in 2007, how much did you grow, what were your projects and what are your expectations for 2008. Normal fare for end-of-the-year assessments and business planning for big businesses. (Read the article here.)
But if you’re a mom and pop outfit — maybe you have a small pig farm or a simple gift shop — it’s easy to slip and slide from year to year with no “assessment” or “planning” at all. You have no stockholders to report to, nor a board of directors to check your progress. However, a simple assessment and planning session perhaps even by yourself or a few friends can clarify issues in your head or crystallize a plan that has been forming while driving.
It helps if you know how to extract the information you need to make a good assessment and how to analyze your own books. I find the articles in the Go Negosyo website to be useful even for those who have no idea what a financial statement is. Most of them were written by SME Insight writers, so no wonder. Click on this link to go to their download section.
The food, beverage, media and healthcare industries all seemed to have a fruitful and eventful year in 2007. All three businessmen from Figaro Coffee, GMA Network and Whealth Inc. see another good year in 2008. What about you? How did your business do?
January 8th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
hi pinoy investor, good luck to your riskier deals! is our age showing a lil bit? hehe. have you ever considered diversifying your business activities, like going into another kind of business?
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:41 am
Hi salve. I hope 2008 will be another good year. I’m working on a bailout plan to recover my investment in the bad deals. I plan to do bigger deals this year. It will be scary but I like the excitement in risk taking. I won’t bet everything like I used to do in my 20s. You become more conservative as you grow older because you realize you have more to lose and don’t have as much time to start all over again.
December 20th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
pinoy investor, very very impressive! they say you win some, you lose some. so what’s your outlook for 2008?
December 19th, 2007 at 11:58 am
2007 has been very good for my business. I started the year with 7.5M portfolio. Now it’s 12M. 60% growth! It’s beyond my expectation. But I made some bad deals this year. My potential loss is 1.4M which I already written off. Result would have been better if not for these bad deals. As they say, charge it to experience.