A few months ago I did an entry on using a simplified financial break-even calculation that a business owner could use for high level strategic planning based on what they’d like to make.  You can see the details here.

As a quick summary, the revenue you need to reach a financial break-even point is your Fixed Costs divided by your Profit Margin.

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I’ve been having a great ongoing discussion with a couple of friends on a business opportunity that one of them is facing.  Over the course of the last 10 years or so, this friend has been doing sales transaction analysis and consulting for small to medium sized companies.

What’s really interesting is that he’s uncovered a set of patterns and commonalities across more than 50 companies that are extremely consistent, despite different sizes, industries and situations.  This data contradicts conventional thinking on how to approach sales and growth for companies and can really pinpoint how to improve results.

In short he has a repeatable process that can make a substantial positive impact to a client’s bottom line for a lot of business clients.  Additionally he has a unique situation and approach – he’s been working on this for 10 years…it’s not going to be easily duplicated. Read More…

This is probably a rhetorical question for a small business owner.  You’ve got a million things to do ranging from:

• getting your bookkeeping and payroll updated (or at least reviewed),
• checking into the details of an HR question an employee brought up last week,
• a vague sense that you ought to have a PLAN for your marketing and not just buying an ad from the nice person that came into your office last week and finally…
• focus on delivering the product or service that you are in business for in the first place!

It stresses me out just writing that…!

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