Should You Sell To One Of The Big Guys?
Is running your own show is the best way for you to grow? One option might be to join up with a bigger company. There are some advantages that come with size: – access to their bigger clients – a well-known brand that will also get you access to new clients – work referred by other […]
Why Overdrafts Are Rubbish
A while ago I wrote about why you should bootstrap for as long as you can noting… “Apart from the obvious benefits of having all of the equity, and not having other people to appease, who might tell you what to do, the greatest advantage is the freedom to make inexpensive mistakes.” The same things can apply […]
You Should Probably Charge More
The world seems to be splitting into extremes. Amazon and the like are wiping out traditional retail, luxury retailers are doing fine, it’s the middle that’s struggling. Great software is mainly free, or a small monthly charge, but some subscriptions cost a bomb per user per month. And still are often worth it. You can […]
What Usually Happens To A Small Business As It Gets Bigger
There is something that I think happens at a particular stage in every growing company. The time you realise you don’t know everything that’s going on. How you manage, delegate, trust, monitor, inspire, reward, performance manage, etc, etc, is the greatest challenge for any business that includes humans. And how you do it will mostly determine your success […]
How To Separate Strategy And Housekeeping
Those mountains aren’t going to climb themselves and you need a good base camp or your best-laid plans will fail. Absolutely make it a cool base camp, life should have some fun, but make sure basic infrastructure doesn’t take up any more time than it needs to. We all know the difference between the two but […]
How To Cherry-Pick Good Ideas From Big Corporates
We all know about economies of scale for big businesses, and of course, there are major diseconomies too. Otherwise small business would never stand a chance. Anyone that’s worked for a big corporate would have had times when they shook their head in horror at the sheer madness of it all. When it seems that it’s […]
Back To Basics – A Checklist
Does your billing/front office system equal the accounts each month? If not you might have a black hole. Regardless, you won’t know how your business is performing. Do your salaries expenses go up and down like bitcoin? Especially if you have fortnightly salaries. You need to adjust for the number of days accrued (not paid […]
It Will Be The End Of The Year Before You Know It
These years just keep getting faster… Right now you’ve hopefully had a lovely break and thinking that getting stuck in can probably wait a few more days. That’s cool. But that’s exactly the reason why your business year should start now, not 1 July. A fresh sheet of paper and all that, not just picking […]
You Should Have Your Numbers On The First Day Of The Month
If you’re doing all the cool things like continuous billing, accruing and prepaying expenses, twice monthly salaries, something like ReceiptBank for automated accounts payable and employee expenses, etc… you should have numbers for the month on the next working day. Not two weeks later. The days of “waiting for the invoices to come in” are over. You […]
Why You Should Outsource Your Bookkeeping
One of the best ways to waste time and/or money is to do your own bookkeeping in-house. But we all do things like that because we are so busy focusing on client problems that anything that’s not dangerously broken gets ignored. Until it does break, and then we console ourselves that it could be worse for […]