Posted by Hugh on March 12, 2012 · Leave a Comment
Business comes down to money. Your financial reports tell you the story of money in your business and if you are headed for failure or success. Register now: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/282969329
Do you know:
- What your current month’s cashflow is?
- Based on current financials, what are your most profitable products/services?
- Whether your accountant or bookkeeper is properly serving your needs?
Gain and understanding of creating an effective financial culture, what your financial reports mean, and what they tell you about the health of your business by attending the Instant CFO Course presented by Hugh Stewart of Carolina Private Financial Corporation.
These webinars are designed for the business owner who wants:
- Clarity on understanding their financial reports
- Empowerment on making financial decisions based on real data
- Confidence on knowing business profitability
- Knowledge to ensure bookkeepers and accountants are accurate and honest
- Accuracy on what brings in money and what loses money in a business
- Techniques for preventing fraud and theft
- Techniques for eliminating errors in financial reporting
Attendees will be presented with valuable tools and the critical skills needed to successfully manage and confidently direct their businesses’ financial narrative.
Hugh Stewart of Carolina Private Financial Corporation is passionate about educating business owners on the power of knowing and controlling their financial story and winning back their freedom.
Posted by Hugh on March 5, 2012 · Leave a Comment
Strategic planning and strategic thinking are nothing more than balancing and understanding how positive and negative thinking come together to help you.
There are rules involved in strategic thinking. The activity is much simpler than people believe. If you consistently focus negatively 
on anything, you will interpret everything negatively. Positive thinking or focusing solely on the positive aspects of situations is not necessarily the best course of action. If you are too positive for too long, you can be blinded to issues that can ruin or severely hurt your business. Realize that the essence of strategic thinking and effective strategic planning is creating a fantastic balance between positive and negative thinking and knowing when to apply both. Taking problems individually and systematically and assigning small actions that you can take for each problem, while not overwhelming yourself, will cultivate a successful perspective.
If you do not have a strategic perspective, you will find yourself dancing to the whims of the market, and you will not really have the conviction that will cause you to successfully lead your business. For Strategic Planning, the Confident Solutions Coach employs a tool developed by Dan Sullivan called the Strategy Circle. The tool melds positive and negative thinking so you can create strategic plans for yourself that are functional and make sense. The basic concept is to use positive thinking to engage, inspire, and activate your imagination, and then focus negatively when you need to come up with specific obstacles.
This is incredibly effective. By engaging in both positive and negative thinking, you can effectively create strategic plans and overcome the barriers standing between you and your goals.
Posted by Hugh on February 27, 2012 · Leave a Comment
A major issue for most business owners is the ‘fire’ or emergency. This is a disruption in the normal routine or business process.
Unfortunately, many businesses are plagued by consistent fires or emergencies. The entrepreneur or the management team is so busy working on these urgent fires they are unable to focus on the important aspects of the business. Most business people are not even aware there is a difference between things that are urgent and things that are important.
I once heard a phrase describing this, “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic”. It illustrates the idea of the frantic urgent problem someone is trying to resolve that overshadows the important problems that are going unresolved.
As a business leader or as an entrepreneur, it is important to take a deep breath, recognize, and discern that many of the emergencies that we feverishly attend to will have no meaningful impact on the long-term success of our business. I am not saying that we should not attend to our urgent business problems; I am simply suggesting that of all the problems that are occurring at any given time, it becomes important to assign priorities. It is critical to be able to determine which problem, if solved, has a longer-term effect on business improvement. When you begin to adopt a longer-range perspective on your business, you begin to better define priorities for yourself and your business.
If you are an employee of a business and the leadership team has not given you priorities, then you get to determine priorities that are best for the business. If you are the business owner, then you get to determine those priorities and communicate them to everybody else in that business. Wherever you are in the business, it is your responsibility to recognize that your job is to provide long-range context for all the emergencies. You do not have to run around and solve every problem today. Just because you have sustained emergencies does not mean that the end of the world coming. If you and the business are around for the long-term, these issues can and will be solved. A calm disposition vastly improves your ability to bring long term solutions to the problems that you have.
It is important to cultivate the ability to have some long-range perspective, and recognize that everything will be okay; even though the sky is falling, the trees are burning and everything is going wrong. Your perspective and ability to breathe and focus on the business is what will bring the calm. You add no value if you transfer and perpetuate chaos, and that’s a huge lesson that we can learn as business owners.
Posted by Hugh on February 20, 2012 · Leave a Comment
Resist the urge to make things complicated in your business. To get your business on track you just need to do some basic simple things.
Financial well-being – Pull financial reports at least once a month. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to look at 
your numbers on a regular basis. You can track your business metrics in a program like Quickbooks to get started. Learn how to read the reports that manage your business. I suggest focusing on three reports; a standard profit and loss statement, a cash flow statement and a balance sheet. With these three reports you start understanding your business financials and how your cash is flowing through your business.
Business metrics – What are the one or two indicators that are responsible for your business success? Watch and review those indicators on a regular basis (weekly or monthly). By tracking these numbers, you will be able to determine whether you are on track.
Team morale – Once a quarter or once a month schedule a conversation with your most important teammates. This is not a strict ‘business-only’ discussion. Ask about their families, how they feel about their work, are there any tasks that they have that they do not really get excited about, review their role responsibilities and their passions in your business.
Customer experience – Create a schedule to speak to your customers. Pick the best customers or random customers and ask them about their experience. Do this on a consistent basis, even as often as once a week. Try a variety of methods, not everyone will be comfortable discussing things face-to-face so consider sending a survey or having a telephone interview. This does not need to be terribly sophisticated; the point is to interact with customers and find out how they perceive your business.
Focusing on these four aspects will help any business owner gain control of his or her business future. As the business grows and expands, each of these items will increase in importance. It is good idea to get them under control immediately.
Mediocre work quality and poor customer service will lead to massive failure.
Posted by Hugh on February 13, 2012 · Leave a Comment
It is amazing how a business owner will gain a sense of confidence when there is unallocated cash in the business bank account. As business owners, very often if the business has money, we will try to find a way to spend it, whether we take more money for ourselves or spend it on the ‘must-haves’ for our business.
People who can easily abstain from spending frivolously on themselves often cannot seem to say no when it comes to spending money on their business. I am not suggesting that it is inappropriate to spend money on the business, what I suggest is spending money by using an organized and simple system of allocations.
The best advice I can give to business owners is to create a savings plan within your business budget. Treat the allocation of money into this savings plan as you would any expense. Pay it every month no matter what. Consider it as if your were paying rent to yourself. Whether you allocate $50 or $500 or $5000 per month; within a very small period, your business will have a ‘war chest’.
I highly suggest having very clear rules around withdrawing money from this account and exactly what type of things money can be withdrawn for. Having strict rules will keep the money from being spent thoughtlessly and when true emergencies and critical events occur, there will be funds available to assist.
I did this very well in a business that I owned until recently. We had an allocation of money into savings every week. Even when we were not profitable and were scrimping by, we continue to fund the savings account. When there were emergencies, or when we needed to make a rapid decision on a purchase that met certain guidelines, we could spend without it affecting our ability to make payroll. This gave us an immense sense of confidence.
This type of asset allocation is something that you can easily implement into your business. I know it might hurt, but if you lived on just $10,000 less a year in your business and redirected that towards a business savings account, that would give you $10,000 of buying power.
The most dangerous person in the system is the business owner. Not creating an allocation, or not having very defined rules about withdrawing can cause it to fail. Create a cash management program for your business that protects the money from yourself.
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