Pro Tip

Pro Tip: Manager Compensation

Nicole Sithithavorn Blog, Pro Tip Budgets, Compensation

November is a great time to start thinking about compensation for your team, at the same time as you are also thinking about planning out your budget for 2027. The reason for this is that the success of your compensation model for your management team and the success of your budget working to generate the ultimate goals of the company should be connected to each other. The best setup creates a win-win where the company wins when the managers win, and when they get paid their bonuses! Step one: look at your data and figure out what the real measures of their successes are.

Pro Tip: Business Evolution

Nicole Sithithavorn Pro Tip planning

Q4 is a wonderful time to sit down with your management team and really talk about what you do in your business and how that has changed over the last year. Very often businesses do not recognize the changes in how they do business day to day. Have your customers changed? Has your offering changed? Has your go to market strategy changed? How has your team evolved both for delivery as well as for the front end customer acquisition setup? All of these things matter, and while you are getting all of the essentials done every day they are evolving. Considering this will improve your 2027 planning.

Pro Tip: Data Improvement for Reliable Forecasting

Nicole Sithithavorn Blog, Pro Tip Budget forecasting, Budgeting, Data, Forecasting

Data improvement does not sound like it is related to Finance, but it is. If data doesn’t exist, is not being recorded via reliable operational processes, or is not granular enough, it will not be able to connect to the financial reporting to create the context that business leaders need to make good decisions. For this reason, often the starting point for quality financial forecasting is data improvement. Give attention to your processes, the ways you can filter operational data in your systems, and how that aligns with your financial reporting and you’ll be on your way to plan for 2027.

Pro Tip: Forecasting Perfection

Nicole Sithithavorn Blog, Pro Tip Budget forecasting, Forecasting, planning

Forecasting is never perfect. While we would like to know the future for sure, we can’t. While it is very important to try to make this as rational and representative of the future as we can, it is equally important to develop it in a way that when we miss we can identify where and, as best we can, why. We want to have some trigger points where we can identify that a planned strategic initiative is going off course, and know that we need to react to it and have an idea of how we might recover. This is why when we forecast, it is not a purely financial exercise, it is also operational.

Pro Tip: Planning to Prevent Poor Outcomes

Nicole Sithithavorn Blog, Pro Tip Cash Flow, debt, investors, Liquidity, planning, pro tip

Most decisions business owners make are not right or wrong, they are about more or less risk, more or less opportunity, better or worse for right now. Some decisions though can be truly harmful, and unfortunately some are truly unrecoverable or just very difficult to cope with for a long time. Taking the wrong money, whether through investors or debt funding is one of those decisions. The best way to prevent that from happening is to do proactive liquidity planning. Don’t put you or your business in the position of having to make a bad decision, plan ahead and give yourself more options.

Pro Tip: Ignoring Challenges Makes Them Worse

csm@yc.partners Blog, Pro Tip Compliance, pro tip, Small Business, Strategy

Most of the time, problems and challenges do not resolve on their own. This is particularly true when it comes to business finance and compliance challenges. Sometimes operations challenges can work themselves out, and yet most of the time they just get more complex and entrenched. All this is to say: do not allow yourself to kick the can down the road too long. Proactively addressing these kinds of issues can be worth immense value to you long-term. Sometimes, things like this can be the thing that takes your enterprise value from millions to zero, in an instant.

©YC Partners 2026

Pro Tip: Mid-Year Alignment: Are You on Track for 2026?

csm@yc.partners Blog, Pro Tip planning, pro tip, Small Business, Strategy

Somehow, it’s June already. Are you meeting your goals for 2026? What is the pace of the leading and lagging indicators that matter in your business? How does a shortfall in a leading indicator impact the success of the lagging indicators and your overall performance this year? At YC Partners, we like to answer these questions and we do this in a mid-year alignment. Why? Management teams are sometimes overwhelmed by their day-to-day tasks, and we all need to take a moment mid-year to really consider where we are at and what we need to do today to meet the goals we set for 2026.

Pro Tip: Mastering Your Business Destiny Through Strategic Finance

csm@yc.partners Blog, Pro Tip pro tip, Strategy

Finance Strategy for businesses, regardless of size, is not a one off occasional activity, at least not when it is done well. Businesses are ever evolving, just like markets, and our economic climate, and for this reason they need to be nimble and proactive enough to react intentionally to what happens around them. To allow themselves to pull the levers they have, even in a world where they have limited control over much of their environment. This is what strategic finance is for, helping leaders to be the master of their own destiny, rather than a victim of unforeseen circumstance.

Pro Tip: Resiliency in Business

Nicole Sithithavorn Blog, Pro Tip planning, pro tip, Resiliency

Resiliency in business finance has not been a big part of the conversation for a few years. It’s all been growth, leverage, ROE, acquisitions, etc. Resiliency matters though. Businesses that stand the test of time, that withstand economic downturns and market shocks, are those that make intentional decisions that allow them to grow without compromising resiliency too much. Nothing is black and white in this conversation, as operators we have to make the right decisions, because it is not just our family depending on those choices anymore. Planning for resiliency makes that possible.

Pro Tip: Change

Nicole Sithithavorn Blog, Pro Tip Change, Strategy

Complacency is a risk to businesses that is often not given enough attention. The risk of making the wrong decision often ends up creating scenarios where no decision is made at all, and thus no change ever happens. The result of this though is that the trajectory of the business inevitably becomes less steep, or even declines. This is true in most operational areas, as well as in strategic finance. Decisiveness is a trait that can make or break your success, it is also a muscle that you can intentionally exercise. Developing the right data and having the right team will make the difference.