The end of the year is a great time to think about money – today we have a guest post from Carolyn K. from the BlogContentGuild.com – take it away Carolyn.

The holidays have descended upon us, and the end of the year is rapidly approaching. If you are a business owner, you’ve probably noticed how difficult it can be to manage cash flow around this time of year. One of the greatest things about November and December is that your sales usually go up during these months. One of the worst things about this time of year is inventory management and order management become more difficult largely because of all the sales you you’ve made.

Here are some tips to help you control your cash flow this holiday season:

1. If you sell goods, double-check your inventory every day. Don’t solely rely on the stock information logged in the computer. Clerical errors are easy to make, and you could end up thinking you have enough of a product to go around when you simply don’t.

2. Make sure you ship orders or deliver services to customers in a timely fashion. Customers don’t want to wait around for you just because it’s a busy time of the year. They expect what they ordered to reach them as soon as possible, just as they would expect any other time of the year. You and your employees may need to work overtime around the holidays to ensure that customers are satisfied with your swift service.

3. If your customers pay you on a monthly basis, make sure you call or email them to remind them about their payments in November, December, and January. These months are when customers are least likely to pay you on time because they have a lot going on in their lives and many of them are low on cash. However, the health of your business during the holidays may depend on payments received.

4. Have a talk with your employees about stepping up their game around the holidays. Everyone at the company needs to be on the same page and devoted to accomplishing all necessary goals before Christmas and in between Christmas and New Years. You might want to ask employees to work overtime for a few Saturdays just to make sure everything gets done.

5. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Mistakes happen. If you and your employees work your absolute hardest during the holiday season, your company’s cash flow situation will remain favorable.

Some great ideas from Carolyn – we’d love to hear your thoughts on holiday cash concerns.  Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

Photo by TibChris

It’s that time of year – the end of the calendar year and for most the end of the fiscal year. For many businesses, when it comes to their financial statements, it’s the time of year spent reviewing their “numbers”. 

In fact, it’s likely that small to medium sized business owners spend more time looking at their financials between Christmas and New Year’s, than any other time of the year. Why? Because it tends to be a slow time of the year (unless you’re in retail), it’s planning time for next year, and everyone is anxious to see how their year ended, even if everything isn’t entered yet.

However, if you’re like most business owners, you probably didn’t get into business to spend all day looking at financials. You got into business to deliver your product or service. The financials are just a by-product and your accountant pulls information off them to keep Uncle Sam happy. Sound familiar? You are not alone – most business owners have a real fear for numbers!  You know they’re important, even if they’re sometimes baffling, but it’s likely you aren’t really learning what you need to from those numbers…!

Try This

The basics are important…but you need to go deeper than just the accounting reports or the tax impacts that your accountant is looking at.  This year, as you look at your Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss, and Income Statements, try focusing on questions like these:

- Did I really make any progress this year?   (How do I know?)

- Why do I have less cash in the bank but my sales increased?

- What areas of my business generated the most revenue?  The most profit?

- Is my spending in line with other companies that provide similar products and services?  (If you’re not sure…we have a really cool financial benchmarking tool that can help you figure that out – call us!)

- Are my employees, department, or staff generating acceptable amounts of revenue for our industry?

- What kind of Return on Investment did I get on my marketing investment this year?  What worked the best?  What was worst?

The list of potential questions is long and they are all valid and yes, there are answers. Unfortunately instead of buckling down and finding the answers, many business owners get overwhelmed and shift their focus back to delivering their product or service, because after all that is why they got into business in the first place. Right?

If you want your business to succeed long term, don’t fall into that trap. If you don’t understand what the numbers mean, raise your hand and get some help. If you do understand your financials, but you aren’t sure if they mean you’re doing good or bad or you struggle to figure out where the opportunities lay for improvement, get some assistance. A fresh detailed Financial Analysis of a business can be an incredibly enlightening and profitable experience for a business owner.  Sometimes a 3rd party can see things that you’re too close to (or help you ask questions you might not have thought about).

Do you know what to look for in your financials? Besides sales and profits, what are the drivers that you scrutinize? Feel free to share your comments below.

Chris Steinlage, Kansas City Business Coach

Photo by MeddyGarnet

  photo by lrargerich 

When you get some quiet time, when you have a few minutes to yourself and you think about your business, do the numbers scare you?  Whether it’s your bank account balance, your taxes, your profitability – are those financial numbers scaring you?

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night sweating because of the numbers?

While that may or may not be true for you, it is sadly true for a lot of business owners.  They love their business, their clients and even their employees but they don’t have a good relationship with the financial numbers around their business.

The good news is there are ways to deal with the fear (and the numbers) and if you can get past this issue you will find your self in a position of power and control that is probably hard to imagine right now.

Read More…

I’ve talked to several business owners in the last few weeks that are struggling because they can’t get a line of credit from their bank (or their line of credit’s been cut off).  Their wallet is empty and it’s causing all sorts of problems in terms of making payroll, investing in future growth and getting a good night’s sleep.

Unfortunately it’s not just anecdotal data – information from the SBA shows that lending is falling sharply.  How sharply?  There’s 30% fewer loans now than 2008 and 55% fewer than were backed in 2007.  That’s a big drop-off!

However there is some good news – in June the SBA announced upped the ante on their stimulus lending program, America’’s Recovery Capital Loan program (ARC).

These have been slow to take off, but I have started to hear people talking about them.  Could you benefit from an SBA ARC loan?  Read on…

Read More…

   photo by peasap 

Leaky buckets aren’t very efficient (and it’s really hard to find a good leaky bucket picture…). 

One of my clients has long been having a proverbial ‘leaky bucket’ problem with their revenue and they’ve been unfortunately leaving a lot of it on the floor.  When times were good that revenue leak wasn’t perceived as that big of a deal – they were still making money, still growing…everything was good.  However their business (like most) has been impacted by the economy and when things started to tighten up, those leaks really started to be an impact.

Where were the leaks coming from and what could they do about it?

Read More…