Taking Care Of Business - 5 September 2026

Well, I guess I just had a couple of things on my list like spring cleaning your business.

I guess the idea of spring cleaning your business is to get rid of some stuff and get rid of maybe some things that are holding you back or maybe some things that you haven't looked at.

Some of the things that come to mind were subscriptions, maybe going through your Xero file or whatever your accounting file is that you use and having a look at it.

all the different subscriptions.

Make sure you look for annual ones as well as monthly ones.

And really, I guess, you know, toss up, you know, do you need it? Do you use that program? Or is that something like Jen Donovan that you bought on a whim that you thought would be great, but you actually forgot about the moment you bought it and now you're left with this subscription?

Open brackets, if it's Jen Donovan, don't unsubscribe, close brackets.

Yes, yes, indeed,

indeed.

But, you

know, that could help, you know, your wallet and your bottom line, but also can, you know, maybe just work well as a make you feel a little bit lighter as you've gone through things like that.

Stock, if you're a business that happens to carry stock, I'm sure you did a stock take probably coming to the end of the financial year But did you actually do anything with that dead stock or with, you know, the stock that you have lying around or that box you discovered that you never knew that you had? You know, is it time to sort of spring clean that? And also, I guess, if you've got stock, looking at those shelves, you know, are they moving? Do you need to create something to make that stock move quicker? Because you've probably got a lot of stock coming in for Christmas as such, which, of course, now we're in spring, isn't that far away.

Yeah, there'd be some things that people would want to hold on to leading into Christmas, for example, because if you sell Christmas decorations, you probably won't have sold many in the last six months.

But if there's stuff that basically your stock count from June doesn't look a lot different to what your stock count from September and you haven't brought any in, probably time to start thinking about maybe discounting them or moving them some other way, offering them as freebies with something else that's bought or something.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Thinking outside the square on how you can move that stock.

Because, you know, you might have stock on your shelves, but that stock is actually still costing you money because if it's not moving, then it's, I guess, taking the space of something that could move.

And just a little hint, Harrods already have all their Christmas stock out.

So maybe if you've got Christmas stock hanging out in the back room there, maybe you could start to put it out, depending on how your customers might react.

If they revolt and don't come back, then maybe it's a little bit early.

But there's certainly a lot of businesses out there that are already starting to sprinkle Christmas around their shop as far as selling decorations, not actually decorating for the season itself.

I would have thought that if you are a Christmas shop, because we've got one or two of those in Geelong that purely and simply sell Christmas paraphernalia, you are very welcome to have Christmas stuff on stock.

Any other shop.

Artie Fishel on the Intelligence wrote a song called It's Only November and basically says, if you're putting up any Christmas stuff before the start of December, you've got rocks in your head.