In business Labour Day is a good reminder for executives and managers about where their results are vs. budget. Managers who are on or ahead of budget will want to stay the course while those who are behind need to implement a plan to drum up business.

Waiting until Labour Day to figure out what to do is risky because there isn’t enough time left with the year-end rush coming. A mid-year-review in June would have been better timing. Whether you are ahead or behind, you need a plan to reach your business goals by year-end. Here are ten suggestions. The first five involve Sales and Revenues:

1. Review your list of Top 20 customers and evaluate with your salespeople if new opportunities have emerged for the last quarter.
2. Extract the list of customers who have not placed an order in recent months and brainstorm with your salespeople about new initiatives to bring them back. Consider new products, faster service, pricing, joint promotions or discounts.
3. Highlight those customers who increased their purchases in the current year. Are there any opportunities for year-end ordering?
4. Ask your salespeople for their top 10 list of hot prospects and discuss how to win these accounts before year-end.
5. If you have more than one product or service, review your penetration by customer. This can be done with a simple table listing customers on one side, and products and services on the other. At the intersection of the customer row and a specific product column, put a check mark showing that the customer has purchased this product YTD or have a blank space showing no purchase. Why no purchase? Customer has no need, or they simply did not know we offer this product.

Here are five more suggestions involving Profitability:

1. Review your Gross Margin YTD. Did your Gross Margin decrease in the last eight months? Was it due to pricing softness, discounts, or costs over-run? Once you know the reason, you can respond.
2. Identify expenses and costs that are over budget YTD and assess which were seasonal and will not continue at the same level of expenses. Then adjust your forecast for the remaining four months.
3. Brainstorm with your operations people new tools that can result in lower expenses for the last four months. If you can make the investment and the initiative’s payback is immediate, these new tools are worth looking into.
4. Are any expenses planned for the 4th quarter that can be postponed to the new year?
5. When distributing objectives to your team members, divide the dollar gap number by the remaining four months so team members have a monthly objective rather than a four-month objective. Monthly objectives are more encouraging because they are bite-size.

Not all the above ten suggestions may be applicable to your business, so pick out what best applies to you.