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

From the Kauffman Foundation’s Sketchbook – Three Things!

This week we are celebrating the 3rd annual Global Entrepreneurship Week, started by our hometown Kauffman Foundation.  With all the focus on generating great ideas and starting up businesses, I wanted to pass along some great advice from business owners and entrepreneurs who made their jump in the last few years.

Making that jump to start your own business takes a lot of guts and the more you can learn from those who have done it, the better off you’ll be. To that end, I did an informal interview with a few of my Peer Group Advisory Boards and asked them simply:

“What’s the best advice you would give someone who’s planning to start a business now?”

Here’s the summary of their responses in no particular order.

1. Enjoy the upside to owning your own business – you’re in charge and you get the freedom and control to do what you want to do. Additionally you have the opportunity to build something that’s all yours.
2. Building a business is complex and you aren’t going to be an expert in everything – don’t be afraid to ask for help along the way.
3. Find a mentor. Someone you can bounce ideas off of, who can help you get perspective and hold you accountable.
4. You’ve got to be flexible…the market will change and your understanding of the market and your business will change as well. Be prepared to adjust your course.
5. Do what you can to find multiple revenue streams, more ways to generate money. If you only have one product or service, it’s likely you’ll get stuck and it’s good to have something to fall back on.
6. Even though you’re in a hurry to get started, take the time up front to really plan things out. Your upfront costs and decisions can make or break you.  Take the time to make sure it’s money well spent.
7. Understand your financials and get accounting and payroll help as soon as you can afford it.
8. Have patience, things will take longer and cost more than you think
9. Make sure you have enough financial runway so you’re not panicked or have to shut down if things take longer than you expect to get off the ground.
10. Whatever business you’re in, you’re in the business of marketing first – if you can’t position and market your product / service effectively not much else matters.
11. Make it your focus to add value with every contact you have (clients, networking contacts, pretty much everyone).
12. Be clear on what you’re getting into when you start a business:  Long hours, challenges outside of your comfort zone and a lonely path. It’s a tough challenge (but worth it when you succeed).
13. Get comfortable with risk and uncertainty.  It will be a while before you can count on a regular paycheck (like possibly 12 to 18 months).
14. Make sure you’ve got family support and they’re excited about what you’re doing.
15. Build connections (real relationships) – networking and building the right win-win relationships is crucial to long term success.
16. Give yourself a clear go / no-go date to help you manage the bumps in the road. If you have a bad month early on, you still have time to recover because you haven’t hit your date yet.
17. Be clear on why you want to create your business…if you’re not excited about what you’re doing, no one else will be either.
18. Make sure you create and work off of a written business plan (can be as simple as a couple of pages, but a plan that covers where the money comes from and where it’s going).
19. Starting something isn’t easy and it isn’t quick – it takes hard work to succeed.
20. Have faith in yourself, when things get tough you have to push through.
21. Your business has a gestational age…despite your full commitment few will take you seriously until you’ve been around at least 9 months…sometimes much longer.
22. Read the E-Myth and be aware of your mix between Entrepreneur, Manager and Technician (and understand what that means).
23. Setup an advisory board for your business – people you trust who will tell you hard truths and encourage you.
24. Figure out if you have the disposition to be an entrepreneur. Look for clues in your past – if you’ve never taken ownership and pushed to make money independently it will be tough to succeed in your own business.
25. Passion trumps perfection, you can’t wait for it to be just right  you have to get out there and start making things happen.

There’s nothing as challenging or as rewarding as creating your own business. And a big part of that challenge is getting your new business off the ground. It’s not for the faint of heart, but the above advice can help you succeed in the critical first year.

What advice above resonates with you?  What’s the best advice you’ve heard for entrepreneurs?  (Or business owners in general?)  Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

I’m a big fan of LinkedIn.  They have a clear focus on professional business networking and they’ve created an extremely effective tool that every business owner should be using.  In fact if you’re not using LinkedIn, now’s the right time to create a profile and start linking!

One of the things I really like about LinkedIn is the steady pace of innovation they’ve had over the years.  They don’t score a hit with everything they roll out, but they are constantly improving and adding new useful functionality.  Considering LinkedIn is a free site that offers a ton of value for business professionals, that’s a pretty good deal!

Just in the last year or two, they’ve made changes to groups, the advertising functionality and even some minor profile changes, but what you should really check out as a business owner is how they’ve been quietly adding stuff to the Company page functionality.  It started when LinkedIn added the ability to follow companies and more recently they’ve added several other worthwhile capabilities worth checking out.

New Company Page capabilities from LinkedIn

- A Careers tab that allows you to centrally post for jobs at your company along with lots of other customization and capabilities (some of which cost money).

- A services tab which allows you to create detailed descriptions of the services you offer (and allows people to post recommendations / testimonials for those services directly.

- An analytics tab that gives you a breakdown of page views, unique visitors, and a trend on followers.  (We would love to have more followers at Aspire…here’s what our page looks like.  We’re still adding some things to it).

Finally – LinkedIn also just added the capability to do Company Status updates.  Note – you have to edit your company page and specify who is allowed to make an update in order for the field to show up.

Kind of unrelated, but LinkedIn also just added a Classmates feature which helps you find anyone who went to your college at the same time you were there.  There was always a way to do this via search, but they’ve done a nice job giving you information and the ability to filter a lot of different ways.  Check out LinkedIn Classmates

Have you created and updated your Company page lately?  People are looking for you and the more positive information they can find, the better off you’ll be.  What do you think of Company Pages?  Any success stories or concerns?  We’d love to hear your thoughts – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

  photo by chuckyeager

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!

Read More…

  photo by 9-lives

Imagine a large elephant and a relatively small rider, making their way through the jungle.  Now imagine the elephant sees something they’re interested in and heads that direction…at that point, the rider is literally carried away, even if that’s not where they wanted to go!

That’s a key premise in Switch (How to change when change is hard) by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.  As the title suggests, this is a book about effecting change…within yourself, your family or your business and it’s full of great stories and a lot of practical ideas.

What’s the deal with the elephant and the rider?  They’re part of an analogy originally developed by Jonathan Haidt – author of The Happiness Hypothesis.  The elephant represents your emotional side and the rider is the analytical / rational part of you.  Think about it this way – it’s mid afternoon, you’re kind of hungry and you know there’s a leftover doughnut laying on a plate in the other room.  Rationally you know you don’t need to doughnut, they’re fried rings of death!  However you also know they taste great and emotionally that doughnut would make you feel really good.  For most people, the elephant is going to win that battle fairly quickly and you are going to eat that doughnut!

That’s what really cool about Switch – they give you a practical framework to not only understand why we act the way we do, but also tools that can help you do something about it.

Read More…