It’s 3 AM and I’m awake. For some reason my brain took this opportunity to review my sales forecast and it’s terrifying. I know I have one client project that finished this month, and one that’s finishing at the end of the year, so my top line is dropping. My 3 AM brain is certain…
We are in the middle of the most important three months of the year for B2B services companies. It’s budget season, and your clients and prospects are making their plans for 2021 over the next few weeks. Do you have a plan to get money allocated to projects you can complete for them? 1. Budget…
I had been getting anxious emails from one of my clients for a couple of days. Each day the anxiety seemed to be getting higher and higher. She was worried about the future of her business. (Aren’t we all!) It seemed like every night she’d wake up, and her mind imagined another doomsday scenario that…
It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked. ~ Warren Buffett What’s going on right now is not a test, but it is showing you what’s not working. If you step back from the crisis a couple of paces and look at your business overall, the stress of…
I got a lot of reaction to my post about sweating out payroll; it seems that a lot of us are anxious about getting our cash in the door. Here are five ways to improve the cash flow of any business! 1. Improve Your Payment Terms Setting favorable payment terms with your clients is the…
There’s nothing that makes me feel more like a failure than when I don’t know if I’m going to have the cash to cover payroll. Vendors can wait, you can negotiate with bankers, even landlords will give you some leeway. But when your payroll is late you are affecting the lives and families of your…
My client called because he was going to have to skip his paycheck this week. Something that hadn’t happened in a long time. “Brad, I used to be able to keep track of my business in one spreadsheet. I had my pipeline on one tab, and my income on another tab and my expenses on…
One of our clients, a high-end personal training studio owner, had a problem that she just couldn’t figure out. She knew how many clients she had and how many sessions each had purchased in their package, but every month her income would come up short. So if she started the month with 160 clients at…
When I was in the business of buying entrepreneurial companies, the first thing we’d look at to determine the value is the cash flow. If you want the option to sell your business someday — it might make sense for you to pay attention to your cash flow now! Most businesses are valued based on…
I’ll never forget looking at her Visa bill. I was sitting in a business owner’s office. She knew that her business wasn’t right, and hadn’t been for a long time, but how bad was it? They were barely making money in the good months, and bleeding in the slow months, and this had been going…