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

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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

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In Jim Collin’s book “Good to Great” he discovered that one of the key drivers for great companies was the consistent ability to “Confront the brutal facts”. 

“Great organizations lead with questions, not answers. If the organization openly confronts the brutal facts of each situation, the right decisions will often become self-evident..”

Basically it’s the ability to do a completely honest and thorough assessment of your current situation – be willing to hear and face the truth, no matter how painful and bleak it might seem.

One common area of brutal facts for many companies centers on employees and their costs.  To start with you need to make sure you’re following another one of Collins key tenets…having the right people on the bus…and in the right seats.

This process includes taking into consideration the employee’s strengths and weaknesses and matching them with the roles and responsibilities in your business. It also means having systems and training procedures to ensure they have every opportunity to perform at their highest level. You have to give them the tools to succeed.  Everyone wants to succeed and do a good job, but if you don’t have the right people in the right roles with the tools and support they  need, you are going to fail. 

When’s the last time you really looked at how your employees fit in your business as it is today?  Do you have the right people in the right roles?

What about confronting brutal facts when the issue is employee numbers and costs?  What do you do when forces outside your control create an environment of change, change that will affect your current staffing needs?

Example – The US Postal Service

Although it has been developing for some time, the US Postal Service will remember the fall of 2011 as the time they were forced to deal with changes that are affecting them in a monumental way.  Caught in this transformation are over 500,000 US Postal employees who for the most part have all been doing their specific jobs perfectly well. However, the internet has changed how we communicate & conduct business…forever. Changes are needed to rescale a US Postal Service into an entity that has the potential to sustain itself, which will undoubtedly mean fewer employees. It has to be dealt with; it is a “brutal fact”.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with the US Postal Service, but what happens all too often in the small business world is a lack of confrontation.  Business owners do not want to accept that a significant change is taking place and so they keep doing what they do in hopes that it will get better on its own. First a few weeks pass, then a few months, and sometimes it turns into years. If they would just truly look at their market trend, at their data, their cost structure, confront the brutal facts, it would be clear a change needs to take place.

In my personal experience, the longer I waited to make an employee change the higher the number of people I negatively impacted. I realized as a business owner, it is imperative to make decisions that keep your business financially sound at all times. If you don’t, you are jeopardizing the livelihood of all the employees and not just the few that may no longer have a place in your organization.

For a small to medium sized business owner this can be a particularly sensitive matter because employees often feel like family. It is completely different than terminating employees for performance issues or when they simply don’t fit your culture. The “brutal facts” are often painful, but at the end of day a downsizing of the company may be the best solution for your company to once again experience momentum and growth (and ultimately add employees again).

Where do you stand on your cost structure?  Are you in the red or the black?  Do you need to consider cutting headcount to make sure you’re still healthy?

Have you confronted the Brutal Facts when it comes to your financials?  Has your world changed and you’re not willing to confront it?  We would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Please share your comments below.

Chris Steinlage  Kansas City Business Coach

Photo by bruckerrlb

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I started Aspire 4 years ago, give or take a couple of days, and it’s been a fun, exhausting and enlightening ride so far.  Not only have I had a chance to learn a ton of great things through my own business efforts, but I’ve picked up a lot of amazing things from my clients as well.

When I started Aspire, I didn’t realize I was ramping up my business a few months before the ‘Great Recession’ started, which has led to some really strong lessons as well (things like living within your means, slow and steady, bootstrap wherever possible, etc.).  It hasn’t been easy and certainly there have been plenty of stumbles and frustrations over the years but there’s also been steady growth and I’ve gained a lot of clarity with each lesson.

As they say…”If I only knew then what I know now…!”.  Which brings me to the point of this post – I wanted to take a shot at sharing the most useful things I’ve learned over the last few years – hopefully they’ll be helpful to others…and if you’ve got some useful things that I haven’t learned yet, then share them in the comments!

What do I mean by ‘Incredibly Useful™’?  I could do a full post just on the technology tools I’ve picked up – stuff like Dropbox, Xobni and Pandora that I use all the time.  But what I wanted to cover here were some of the ideas that I either didn’t know or didn’t appreciate when I started.  I’m trying to read a new business book every few weeks…and some of these ideas came out of those books, but they also came out of real world application…practical (and Incredibly Useful™) ways to grow your business now…

1. It’s all about Marketing Consistency

One of the secrets of marketing that most people don’t pay much attention to is consistency.  Way too many business owners will spend money to make a big splash, but it’s a one and done approach…and they get frustrated when that doesn’t work very well.  What does work is getting in front of your target market on a very regular basis…in fact I’ve found that consistency is even more important than having a perfect message.  It’s your consistent presence over the long run that opens the doors…without consistency, you’re just floundering.

Incredibly Useful™ Tip:  Try this – Find at least 1 (preferably 2 or 3) marketing tactics that you can apply consistently every single month.  Newsletters, blog posts, post card campaigns, ads, events, meetings…if you’re not doing anything on a regular, repeatable basis now for marketing…you have to start…this month!

2. Use a Calendar not a list

One of the biggest challenges facing business owners (or anyone else for that matter) is the ability to consistently get things done.  Where most of us fall short is having too much to do and not enough time to do it.  We start with a list of really important things to do…start working the list and life happens and more stuff gets added to the list.  We reprioritize, work on some other stuff and more life happens!  Bottom line – not much gets done, which is why putting the important stuff on the calendar will help you actually get it done.  There was a study done a couple of years ago that showed that critical things that needed to get done where 75% more likely to actually get done if they were scheduled on a calendar!

Incredibly Useful™ Tip:  Try this – take a look at your to-do list and transfer the most important items to your calendar.  This will require you to estimate how long it will take and to find an open block of time to actually do it…which is why it works so much better.  There’s only so many hours in the day and this calendar approach will force you to honor that law of nature so you don’t kid yourself into thinking you can do more than you actually can.

3. It’s all about (well placed) Confidence

Picture this – you’re having a bad day and you are totally unprepared as you go into a sales meeting with a prospective client who would be a great fit for what you do.  You approach the meeting  with a real lack of confidence…saying things like “I don’t know” or “I wish I knew the answer to that…”.  How well do you think that meeting is going to go?  It’s going to poorly – people are looking for answers they can trust and if you don’t display real confidence, you’ll get eaten alive.  That lack of confidence comes shining through and you become extremely unattractive!

Incredibly Useful™ Tip:  Try this – Focus on building confidence going into sales meetings.  Confidence is the secret to success, but it has to be confidence that’s earned.  Here are some things to keep in mind to build up your confidence:  Let yourself take pride in what you do, make sure you’re overly prepared for the meetings and spend time visualizing a successful outcome.  Finally – when you head into that meeting, pretend like you are independently wealthy and don’t need the business.

4. You’ve got to have Focus

At any given time, you and your employees should all be very clear on what’s the MOST important thing you need to get done right now.  Outside of the day to day business operations, you should all be on the same page of what needs to get accomplished next.  Without that shared focus, the odds are very high that different people are working on different things or that things will change from day to day.  Either way, you’re not getting things done that way!

Incredibly Useful™ Tip:  Try this – take an hour or two of time and write down the 5 most important things you need to do this quarter – be specific and measurable.  Now out of those 5, pick which one is the most important thing.  Write the top 5 (and top 1) down, put it on your wall and give a copy to each employee and have them post it as well.  Rinse and repeat at the end of 90 days!

5. Be Really Visible

People will buy when they’re ready to buy (sadly not when you’re ready for them to buy).  So that means if you want to sell to people you either have to get really lucky and call them on the day that they’re thinking about buying…or you have to be top of mind when they’re ready to start looking.  The way to stay top of mind is to consistently keep your visibility up, make sure people know who you are and what you do and do it in a memorable way…consistently.

Incredibly Useful™ Tip:  This is where a tool like Social Media comes in.  My preference is LinkedIn, but Facebook can be effective for the right kind of business as well.  Make sure you are continually building up your connections with people you Know, Like and Trust…and that you are updating your status with useful and interesting information – if you blog (and you should consider doing that, link back to a blog update).  You could also answer questions online or reach out to people you know…bottom line, spend 30 to 60 minutes a week, be active and stay visible.

6. It’s not about you…it’s about your clients

This can be a hard lesson for some business owners.  It’s easy to get wrapped up in all of the cool things you can do and to want to share that endlessly with whoever will listen (we’ve all been trapped in that conversation at some point).  Don’t take it personally…but your prospective clients don’t care about what you do.  They ONLY care if you can solve their problems…how can you really help them?  Focus your efforts on what’s in it for them.

Incredibly Useful™ Tip:  Try this – Next time you meet a potential client, do everything in your power not to talk about yourself.  You don’t have to be weird about it, just ask a lot of questions on what they are struggling with, what the implications are and really (really) listen to what they have to say.  If you do this the right way and you can help them, then it’s no longer selling, it’s just educating them on how you can make their lives / situation better, but it starts with their problems, not your stuff!

7. Project your Profits

If your like most business owners, you probably have a good idea of how much money you’d like to make this year.  Unfortunately if you’re like most business owners, that’s about all you know…you don’t really know when that money will come in (i.e. what month), where it will come from and how all of that works with your expenses, cash flow and profitability.  In essence you are flying blind…and eventually that will get you in a LOT of trouble.

Incredibly Useful™ Tip:  Try this – create a Profit Plan for your business.  Keep it simple, but lay out a month by month projection of your planned revenues and costs for the year.  That alone is a worthwhile exercise, but where it really gets fun is when you start figuring out how you’re going to generate the planned revenue…what marketing needs to happen, when, is it reasonable?  There’s a lot you can learn from this kind of projection – if you want a template to start with Contact Me and let me know what you want.

Any of these resonate with you?  What did I miss?  What incredibly useful things have you learned in the last few years?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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I had the chance to watch Hoosiers over the holidays – it had been a long time since I’d seen it (and the rest of the family hadn’t seen it!).  Great movie – I’d highly recommend catching it again!

If you’re not familiar with the movie – it was made in 1986 and it’s the story about a basketball coach (Gene Hackman) who gets a final chance at redemption by coaching at a very small rural Indiana school.

Although it’s a very small school they have some talented players and reasons to believe they can compete but they’re undisciplined and raw when the coach makes it to town.

One of the things that stood out to me is the coach’s approach to bringing the team around – early on he tells the team:

“I’ve seen you guys can shoot but there’s more to the game than shooting. There’s fundamentals and defense.”

There’s more to the game than shooting…now how would that apply to small business owners? (you knew I was going to tie this into business somehow didn’t you…?)

The key to the team’s success in the long run was focusing on the fundamentals of the game.  Coach Dale purposely breaks the team down and builds it back up focusing on fundamentals…things like requiring the team to make 4 passes before they can look for a shot, running specific plays and defense, even when they’re getting beaten.

For a business owner the fundamentals are all about getting back to basics, making sure that you are focused on a few key principles.  There’s a great article in the New York Times on The Top 10 Reasons Why Small Businesses Fail, the author does a great job of cutting through the noise and laying out concrete reasons that a lot of businesses struggle.

In short – they aren’t focused on the fundamentals.  Here’s my take on some the key fundamentals that you need to get right in your business – let me know what I miss:

1. Knowing the value you add to your customers

Is there a market for what you do?  What do people actually pay you for?  Are you clearly communicating that value in everything you say and do?  Are you single-mindedly focused on that value or are you chasing a lot of other things?

2. The business model makes money and there’s future opportunities

Can you make enough money to meet your goals?  How about enough money to meet payroll?  Could you make it if your biggest client left tomorrow?  Do you have enough cushion / runway in terms of savings to hang on until things turn around?  Can you conservatively map out a profit in the next year?

3. Ability to deliver value consistently, predictably and without killing yourself

A lot of business owners are good at what they do, but they are single handedly doing all of the work and doing it in a haphazard way (that makes it unpredictable and impossible to scale).  You fundamentally have to be able to deliver your value…even when you aren’t there.

4. Clear idea of what’s going on in your business

Could you print out a list of your hot leads right now?  Do you know how much money is coming in and going out this month?  How about this week?  How profitable are your products or services?  What metrics are you tracking?

5. A short term and long term direction that’s clear and understood by all

Are you consistently evaluating where you are, where you want to be and how you’re going to get there?  Are you investing the time and effort to consistently lead your business and make improvements? Is everyone on your team using the same playbook (do they all know what’s going on)?

If you’re in good shape on the 5 fundamentals listed above, then your business is probably in good shape!

What fundamentals did I miss?  How are you faring on the ones that I listed?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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