fbpx

Category - Finance

Get FREE weekly ideas to grow your business

1
Managing A Mature Business – Managing Cash Flow
2
Clean Up Your Business While You’re Quiet
3
A 5 Day Challenge To Master Your Business Finance
4
Why Understanding Finances Is The Secret Ingredient
5
What to do when business isn’t great Part 3

Managing A Mature Business – Managing Cash Flow

This is the first in our series of blog posts about Managing A Mature Business.

In case you missed it, we completed a set of 7 posts about Starting A Small Business, from making sure you know your Purpose to how to start up, to preparing a feasibility check, planning and hiring your first employee, and you can catch up by going to teikoh.com. We have also just completed another 7 part series on Growing Your Business from learning about Key Performance Indicators for your growing business to marketing, working with employees and making sure you have the systems to scale. You can also look for it on our website at teikoh.com.

In a business, at any stage of its life, cash flow is an extremely important part of that business’ lifeline and will always need to be managed.

However, in a mature business, the cash flow pattern is more challenging. The business is no longer growing, in some cases it is stagnant and while you may have reduced investment needs, the cash that is generated through a mature and stagnant level of sales may not be replenishing the “catching up” of cash outflows that you were experiencing before.

There are four stages of a business cycle, being startup, growth, maturity, and potentially decline.

In the startup stage, sales are low in volume but grow quickly. In the growth stage, sales are beyond the break-even point and both sales and profits are increasing. In the mature stage, the rate of growth slows down and cash flows become relatively stagnant.

If you are not managing your cash in maturity, in order to invest in innovation and new products and services to kick off the next growth phase, you may enter the decline phase where all sales, profit and cash flow decline until you exit the business.

Read More

Clean Up Your Business While You’re Quiet

OK, so it’s early January; you’re still full from the celebratory food and drink, and you may not have opened your business in the New Year yet.

Even when you open this or next week, maybe because of the usual holiday period and a little virus it will be a bit quiet in these first few weeks.

Well, instead of doing nothing, how about taking advantage of this and cleaning up some things in and around your business? Now is a great time to tidy up inefficiencies, catch up on some administration, finish those new ideas you have, and make plans for the future.

Here are some of the things you can do around and in your business when it’s quiet.

First, you can sit quietly over the next couple of days and prepare your business plan for the coming year.

Read More

A 5 Day Challenge To Master Your Business Finance

In 40 years of advising small businesses and helping them grow, I have noted that the most successful small businesses to 6 things really well:

  1. They show and encourage leadership within the business;
  2. They make planning a habitual practice in the business;
  3. They are always marketing;
  4. They ensure that their customer enjoys a fulfilling journey through their business;
  5. They have made their processes and operations efficient; and
  6. They do not neglect to understand their finances.

This week I’m going to talk about finances.

But I’m not going to teach you how to be an accountant!

I’m going to tell you why you cannot neglect the skill of understanding your finances and then set you a challenge that will show you how to cheat your way to mastering your finances!

Read More

Why Understanding Finances Is The Secret Ingredient

I’m going to talk about finances.

Stop!

Don’t delete the email or close the window! You really need to hear this, and I promise it won’t be boring!

OK, jokes aside, unless you are a finance specialist like an accountant or a bit of a numbers nerd, finances usually make a small business owners’ eyes go blank.

That’s understandable because if you are like most small business owners, you started your business as a subject-matter expert. You knew your stuff, that’s why you had the confidence to start your own business. You knew that at worst, you could back yourself on selling what you know. But you’re an intelligent person, so you realised that running your own business wasn’t like working for the man, where all you had to do was show up and do your stuff. That’s why, to your great credit, you end up reading websites or newsletter like this.

You knew you had to find out about business planning, you had to know about marketing, you had to find the sales prospects and work out the best and most efficient way to supply what you supply. You had to hire staff and then manage them.

And, you had to manage the finances.

Like most people who are not finance trained you probably bought software that was hopefully easy to use, and you copied the data at the end of the year and gave it to your accountant. As soon as you could afford it, you hired a bookkeeper and handed the operation of the accounting software to her.

I don’t like to tear you down, but that’s not good enough.

Here’s why. Read More

What to do when business isn’t great Part 3

This is the final video in the series about what you can do when your business isn’t doing so great just now.

I am truly positive about working on your business. I truly believe that if you reframe any situation, you can look for the positive and you can come up with strategies to take you forward. All my writing and video talks in my blog are about business growth, about the systems and tools to take your business and your life up another level.

However bad times happen.

Only, I believe the same attitude can overcome bad times, and in the last two videos I gave you some ideas about how you can turn a bad situation around.

Do I know what I’m talking about? Yes I do. Apart from spending over 35 years of my life successfully advising entrepreneurs and small business owners across the world on how to create the business they see in their vision, I have also had cause to pull myself out of near bankruptcy.

Bad partners. Yup, bad partners, but even today I don’t see it as “their fault“. I own my own destiny and you should too. I looked at my “near-death business experience” with realistic eyes and relied on all the systems and tools I knew and created strategies and pulled myself out and created a very successful consulting business from the ashes. You can too – in the last couple of weeks I gave you ideas about how to create recovery strategies if business isn’t great for you at the moment, now watch this last video in the series.

Were you surprised by my last suggestion?

Despite my belief that you can and should keep looking for ways to pull yourself out of trouble, sometimes you have to look reality in the face and know when a situation is too wrong to be righted. Don’t make that decision lightly, but realise you may have to make that decision.

Here I am hoping that you never find yourself having to make that final decision, and I’d love to hear what you think – click here to leave a comment under this video-blog post on my website.

GET YOUR FREE BUSINESS HEALTH CHECKLIST HERE

And finally if you are reading or watching this on one of my social media channels, what are you doing??? You are missing out on having great ideas, systems and step by step solutions to your business growth issues delivered directly to your inbox, every week, and for free!

Just click here and give me your name and email (which I guarantee never to sell or give away) and I will send you updates every week.

Copyright © Teik Oh Dot Com. Developed by OTS Management Pty Ltd