Financial Management

Protect Your Business In Tough Times

Jun 15 2022

As we open up after the pandemic lockdowns, many businesses are yet to fully recover. In fact, some may never recover from the enforced closures and the extended reduction in demand as customers preferred to stay home to be safe.

While people begin to embrace this new world, it is still tough out there.

This means we have to think of ways to protect your business in tough times.

While it may not be possible to be fully proofed against these times, what is possible is to secure your business as much as possible by following some common-sense business strategies.

These strategies can be either “defensive” or “aggressive” strategies.

As your profit performance drops it is difficult not to panic and to tighten all your spending. However, you can tighten things too much. While it is natural to seek defensive strategies such as cutting costs, it is important to keep in mind the more aggressive strategies – those that your business should take to ensure that you are the one in your industry survives while others are closing down. Read More

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Managing A Mature Business – Managing Cash Flow

Dec 07 2021

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.

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7 Ways Of Financing A Small Business

Jul 20 2021

Whether you are starting your small business, or planning to invest to grow an already existing business, you will come to a time when you need to find extra cash.

Here are seven ways you could finance your small business.

But first, we should discuss the good and bad reasons why you are seeking the extra cash to invest in your business.

Good reasons to invest in your business include starting a business with a proven market or product and expanding a profitable business. Starting a business with a totally new idea is riskier, so if you are borrowing money or investing your own savings, you should be aware of the higher risk involved.

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A 5 Day Challenge To Master Your Business Finance

Sep 15 2020

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:

They show and encourage leadership within the business;
They make planning a habitual practice in the business;
They are always marketing;
They ensure that their customer enjoys a fulfilling journey through their business;
They have made their processes and operations efficient; and
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!

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Why Understanding Finances Is The Secret Ingredient

Nov 26 2019

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

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Category - Financial Management

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Protect Your Business In Tough Times

Managing A Mature Business – Managing Cash Flow

7 Ways Of Financing A Small Business

A 5 Day Challenge To Master Your Business Finance

Why Understanding Finances Is The Secret Ingredient