It is essential for business success to have clearly defined goals. Financial goals include having an operating budget with a target for income and a target for expenditure, which by default provide a target for profit.

Actions must be taken to achieve the income target and to stay within the expenditure levels set by the budget. Ongoing monitoring of the budget and measurement of actual performance against it are critical and deviations are known as favourable (better than) or unfavourable (worse than) variances.

A business owner must have a realistic budget to work towards, and have a comfortable understanding of all of its underlying components in order to maximise profit.

Learning Objectives:
1. The cyclical nature of business and need for realistic income and expenditure forecasts for each prospective cycle against which to measure actual performance.
2. The drivers underpinning revenues – seasonality, competition, volumes and prices, margins. The nature of expenses – fixed v variable; discretionary v non-discretionary.
3. Practical tools and helpful hints for preparing budgets and the importance of reviewing past performance to manage future expectations.

Learning Outcomes:
1. An appreciation of the need to have considered operating budgets against which to measure actual performance.
2. Confidence to prepare realistic operating budgets and to converse with other stakeholders in their preparation process and performance review
3. An ability to regularly review and interpret budget variances and to make sound strategic business adjustments as required

About your presenter: Graham Blackadder
Graham Blackadder BCom (UNSW) CPA has had a colourful career spanning more than 40 years, most of it in senior roles as Chief Financial Officer/Finance Director and Company Secretary, and mostly with high profile multinational, corporate enterprises.

Late in his career, he retired from the corporate high-life to manage fulltime the finance and compliance, the IT and communications aspects of The Blackadder Recruitment Company, which he and his wife had formed some years before.

Graham brings both his extensive big-business expertise and his first-hand experience of a successful small business start-up, to help you maximise your own small business aspirations.

Having now sold the business into a larger enterprise, Graham devotes his time to ad hoc consulting and charitable pursuits.

About your Host: Kevin Bascomb
Kevin is an experienced business advisor with a demonstrated history of working in the management consulting industry since 1989. His strength is in negotiation, business planning, customer service, sales, and strategic planning.

Kevin has worked across a variety of government agencies and businesses, with broad cross section of skills from which to craft solutions to business challenges, from the strategic to the operational.

Kevin has been an owner of retail businesses and a boutique management and marketing consultancy providing strategic advice on economic and tourism development in regional areas.

In addition to Kevin’s business experience, he holds a Bachelor of Economics and a Graduate Diploma in Business Administration.

This Business Connect event is funded by the NSW Government.