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Porirua – The absolutely last thing to do when selling your business 18 feb 2010

Jeff — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:29:01 +0000

BOOST Business Coaching

Title: The Absolutely last thing you should do when selling your business!

Email jeff@boostbusiness.co.nz if you would like to attend the next course

Target Market: Anyone who intends selling their business over the next 2 – 10 years

Topic: This seminar is a short workshop discussing the most common mistakes that business owners make when selling their business that costs thousands / hundreds of thousands of dollars. You will go away with knowledge, templates & specific actions to add thousands of dollars of value to your business. You will also find out the last thing that you should do when selling your business!

Cost $99 per participant

Pay Now $99.00 Safe and Secure – GST invoice will be issued

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Presented by…

Jeff Smith

BOOST Business Coaching

info@boostbusiness.co.nz

www.boostbusiness.co.nz

“The plan with Jeff’s guidance helped turn our business around and we headed off with confidence and new direction.”

John and Coralee Stevens

CAS cleaning products

Business Advice Wellington

Jeff — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:41:12 +0000

Business Advice Wellington

Every day we get tons of enquiries from Wellington Business. We will attempt over time to answer some of the most frequent questions In a series of articles.

One of the more popular questions concerns debt collection and best practice around this. Most small Wellington Businesses have had issues around this at one stage or another. BOOST Business wrote an article about how to stop giving your customers permission to delay paying you which was generally well received however we thought it was time to delve into the topic in a little more detail.

Business Advice Wellington

Get paid on time every time
1.   Don’t give them a reason to delay paying you. Your invoice should be accurate, pretty well detailed but easy enough to understand. Include;
a.   Your Company’s contact info, name, address, GST no. Phone, Email, Web and name of the contact person.
b.   Invoice Date
c.   Customers Name and Address
d.   Itemised Description of Goods and Services
e.   Amount due with GST amount
f.   Invoice Terms – See Business Advice Wellington article on how to stop giving permission to your customers to delay paying you

Invoicing

2. The longer you take to send an invoice the longer it will take for you to get paid. Send invoices promptly and religiously every week, fortnight or month. (Daily or on Job completion would be even better)

Stock Turn

3. Think about the time it takes you to receive the cash for the goods or services you provide. If you order your raw materials in January – and you are lucky you pay for these on 20th February. Depending on your stock turn or manufacturing process the materials / stock could be in storage for 1 to 90 days. You sell the end product and say wait for 60 days. When you drill down and take the time to realise the impact could be a delay of between 60 – 150 days before you are paid. The ideal for this scenario is to be paid 0 to minus 30 days. Its possible depending on your operational processes. Call BOOST to discuss this – you could end up freeing thousands of dollars – You might even get rid of the overdraft.

Calculate this

4. Do the following calculations

a. Calculate your average collection period by dividing your total sales for the previous year by 365. This gives you your average daily sales volume. (Total Sales / 365 Days = Average Daily Sales Volume)
b. Then divide your average daily sales volume into your current accounts receivable balance to get the number of days it takes to collect a bill. (Average Accounts Receivable Collection Period = Average Daily Sales Volume / Current Accounts Receivable Balance)

This is you average accounts receivable period. Answer the following questions

Question 1: Is your average accounts receivable collection period in line with your business terms of trade? If your terms of trade provide your customers with 30 days to pay their bills, then you should expect that your average collection period will be somewhere around 30 days – maybe a little longer. If your average collection period is 60 days then you need to examine other factors that affect billing.

Question 2: Are you billing your customers consistently? Look at your Accounts Receivable Aging Report. Are the outstanding invoices on that report related to products and services sold within the last 45 days, or are they related to products and services you provided three months ago and just got around to billing? Create a procedure to bill customers once a week or each time you have a completed sale.

Question 3: Are you following the above guidelines about invoicing your customers with enough information and on previously agreed terms? Are your customers calling you with questions about your invoice?

Question 4: Are you tracking overdue accounts and taking consistent action to collect past due accounts? Do you have an effective process in place to track when an account comes due, and knowing who has paid their bills and who has not? When a customer’s invoice goes past its due date, is there a procedure in place to follow-up with that customer? Sometimes sending customer statements and making friendly reminder calls is all it takes.

Business Advice Wellington – Summary

So our Business Advice for Wellington Business is to answer these four basic questions, implement a few basic procedures you’ll soon be running a fine-tuned collection machine. If you want help putting together an effective proven collection process contact us at BOOST.

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Business Advice Wellington – Try the $299 Business Advice Wellington special – One month coaching programme

Wellington Business Advice

Jeff — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 09:43:21 +0000

Its amazing how many businesses we come across that dont have the most common financial knowledge when it comes to cashflow, profit, equity and income or measuring these.

Wellington Business Advice

One skill we get out of the way early on is the ability to Budget in a business. Even our $299 BOOST lite programme provides our clients with the skills and tools (on a USB stick) to enalbe them to put in place very easy a

Simple Cashflow forecasts

Forecast Profit tools

Cashbook Templates

Break – Even analysis

Often we can get these out of the way within two hours.

The article below is written by a Business Coach from the USA. She writes about the case for Budgeting. Its funny but the most crucial things we need to do in business are often the most boring and monotonous.

I insist with my Wellington Business Advice clients that they demonstrate skills in these areas before allowing them to outsource any of this work. That way my Wellington Business clients have a firm understanding of these basic Business foundations. Its only after this that my clients get to experience the exciting stuff like BOOSTing results and doing the job more efficiently

Wellington Business Advice

There are many resources out there for small business owners to teach them to market or to use social media or to develop a brand. These are good practices to have but I’d argue that the top business best practice is not marketing or social media usage or branding. It’s budgeting.

Don’t get me wrong: marketing, sales, branding, positioning… they’re all critical to business! But a business that brings in lots of money, but loses the money because it doesn’t know where the cash is going, won’t be in business long. I like to use the example of a bucket: Sales and marketing are meant to increase the amount of water that will flow into your bucket. However, if there are several holes in your bucket then all the water in the world isn’t going to help. Budgeting plugs those holes and helps you to keep track of your money, essentially keeping more of it in the business.

Although budgeting can seem like a drag, especially when you consider the fun and highly creative marketing tasks that need to be done, it’s no wonder that business owners avoid this activity!

Setting a business budget should be a priority. One area where many small business owners get into trouble is with taxes. Thus, when you’re setting up your budget, the first thing you should do is take a percentage of everything you make and put it into an account specifically for taxes. Then, when you get to the end of the year and that dreaded tax bill is due, you won’t be scrambling to figure out how to pay it.

After you have dealt with the tax issue, you should calculate what it will cost to run your business each month. If you are operating your business out of your home, your budget should include an amount for renting the office space in your home and utilities. This amount should be paid to you. Include in your budget an estimate for office supplies, such as paper, ink for your printers, etc.

Remember, it is better to overestimate and have money left over at the end of the year than to underestimate and end up in the red. You should look realistically at your business and decide what it really takes to operate it. If you entertain clients, budget for it. If you’re going to be advertising, budget for that. If you use your personal vehicle, budget for gasoline and a portion of the maintenance. Include your salary and a “catch all” category for those unplanned emergencies. Do not overlook any detail of your operating expense. After you have taken into consideration all the applicable items and prepared a budget, ask your accountant for input.

Now that you have successfully prepared a feasible budget, the biggest and most important step is to stick to it! Sometimes it is easy for a business owner to think, “I’ll make it up later in the year” and spend money that is allocated for something else. Do not fall for that! If you know you’re going to have a big purchase, start saving for it and buy it when you have the money. If you have a catastrophic event, such as your printer dies and you have to get one right now, then that comes out of your “catch all” fund.

If you adhere to your budget faithfully, there will not be any surprises when you meet with your accountant at the end of the year. Truth be told, you may be surprised at how much money you have to start the New Year.

Heather Villa, MBA CMA MSM, is a Business Coach and Entrepreneur. She helps business owners achieve success in operations, productivity, project management, and social media. Read her other articles at http://hireheathervilla.com/resources/articles/ and visit http://heathervilla.com for more information.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Heather_Villa

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Jeff Smith - The Business Coaching Guy