Episode Overview
Many businesses fail. One of the leading reasons is because they don’t understand how to read and properly utilize their financial reports. Many entrepreneurs think that these are only needed for tax time, but that could not be further from the truth.
So on today’s episode, we are going to walk through five challenges that arise when you don’t understand and use your business financial statements. Additionally, we are going to share several real world examples of these from our various businesses.
Episode Key Points
The differences in our businesses before and after we began understanding and leveraging our financial statements (hint… after is MUCH better)
Reviewing your financial statements on a consistent basis can help you identify problems much sooner
The more frequently you review your financial statements, the easier it is to understand and explain the story that they are telling
Creating a “Cashflow Forecast” will help you look ahead and identify months with extra cash and months with deficient cash
Understanding your margins will help you create more profit
Once you know your margins, there are several strategies that will allow you to increase your margins
Trying to grow your business without understanding the numbers will cause more stress and struggle than required
Understanding your business financials will allow faster decisions with confidence.Click To Tweet
Links and Resources Mentioned in the Episode
Our Free Facebook Community for Entrepreneurs (Request Your Access)
Gusto (The payroll provider that saved us $900+ a year on our payroll expenses)
Margin Calculator
Introduction to the 3 Main Financial Statements (Free Download)
Rental Real Estate Property Calculator (Free Download)
Episode Free Download
Episode Transcript
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Ariana:
This the Serial Startups Podcast show 27. In the previous episode we discussed passion and whether you need to be a successful entrepreneur. Today we kick off our miniseries on understanding your business finances, starting with some of the impacts when you don’t understand your financial statements. Are you looking to start a business but need a little more guidance and support to really get it going? If so then we invite you to join our Startups Academy for we have created a ton of resources and step by step guides to help you determine which business you should start with, how to launch it quickly, how to growing it to being profitable and automated so that you get your time back.
Welcome to the Serial Startups Podcast where we bring you the real deal when it comes to masterminding a business, juggling personal relationship and a busy household. We are your hosts and serial entrepreneurs, Tom and Ariana Sylvester, and this is the podcast for people who want to get more out of life. We want to show you how to build multiple streams of income and get on the fast track to being your own boss. Join us as we talk about our ideas, successes, and failures both in business and in life.
Tom:
Welcome back to the Serial Startups podcast. If you guys are joining us for the first I’m Tom.
Ariana:
I’m Ariana.
Tom:
We are serial entrepreneurs. Part of the reason I say that is because the topic we’re getting into this month is not the most popular topic. It’s basically understanding your business financials. Before we get into that, the format of this podcast is basically each month we pick a theme and then we spend 3 episodes really diving deep into that theme to help you implement practices in your business that are going to help you out. We just finished a theme of productivity and how you could be more productive. Like I said, the focus this month is really going to be on understanding your business financial statements.
If you guys have a topic that you want to hear about, something that will help your business, head on over and join our private Facebook community. While you’re there you can hang out with other great entrepreneurs, you can learn and you can also contribute. If you are interested in that head over to sscommunity.co.
Ariana:
Okay so, business financial, sounds like a super fun topic.
Tom:
Like I said it’s definitely not the most interesting topic, but it is critical for being able to be successful in business. Part of the reason we’re talking about this is we’ve seen so many entrepreneurs that fail in business, or you hear about all the businesses that fail. One of the major contributors to that is people don’t know their numbers.
Ariana:
Let’s talk about the early days of our businesses. Check number 1, we had to keep putting our own money in the business to cover expenses.
Tom:
How did that make you feel?
Ariana:
Not good.
Tom:
Yeah, especially because I don’t think I had you sold on being an entrepreneur yet.
Ariana:
Nope, that did not help.
Tom:
Yeah, when something came up and I said, “Hey we’ve got to put $1,000 in this business [crosstalk 00:02:47] not good.
Ariana:
Say what?
Tom:
We also, kind of related to that, we racked up a bunch of credit card debt.
Ariana:
Yeah. Well, when you use your savings to go in your business, you’ve got to spend the money you need for personal stuff somewhere else and that happened to be credit cards.
Tom:
Yeah.
Ariana:
We never seem to make any money, because we’re throwing it all back in.
Tom:
Yeah, throwing it in, and to be honest we didn’t know what came in, what went out or how our the cash even flow through our business. Related to that a lot of the decisions, especially the ones I made, were based on a gut feel and not actually any information.
Ariana:
No data.
Tom:
No data. I think that that’s a lot of how small business owners operate. If they need to buy something they’re like, “Oh yeah, I can justify this piece of equipment because it’s going to help me in my business.” But if you’re not actually looking at, what’s the cost of that? How long is it going to take to make the money back? It might take you 20 years, [inaudible 00:03:44] time it may not make sense.
Ariana:
Yeah, to bring it all together, basically it was stressful.
Tom:
Very stressful.
Ariana:
Let’s talk about today now.
Tom:
Today is very different. We’re continuously reviewing our financials for each of the businesses that we have, and related to that we also have key indicators that we know to look for. From our financial statements there’s some basic things that we look at, but then each business, we have a real estate investing business, we have a wine and liquor store, we have a variety of websites, and then we also have this coaching business. For each business we also have some key indicators that help us understand how that business works. Then we have actually eliminated all of our business credit card debt.
Ariana:
Except for our very super smart usage of 0% interest checks.
Tom:
Absolutely.
Ariana:
Because if you do have a business card, or actually any credit card a lot of times once you’ve paid it off and it’s at 0 they want you to spend more money on it so they send you those, “Hey you can write yourself a check for 0% interest,” which if you think about it is sometimes smarter than going to get a bank loan because it’s 0% interest, not whatever the bank’s going to give you. If you have that planned and placed to pay it off within those certain amount of months, you just got that money for 0% interest. It was awesome.
Tom:
Yeah, and the key thing with this, you can get it right away.
Ariana:
Yeah. Basically you’re investing into your own business by taking out a loan from your credit card.
Tom:
When you go to a bank you have to go fill up the forms, get approved, and that could take a couple weeks. As we’ll talk about, one of the struggles that business have is cash flow. This is just one of the many strategies we use to make sure that we have money available when we need it for our business. Also we actually make business decisions based on the numbers, not my gut feel. Let me tell you, it’s amazing at how much clarity you can have once you actually understand how to read the numbers.
Ariana:
It makes a big difference.
Tom:
Yeah. I look at it like, if you don’t understand your business financials, you look at your business and you’re only seeing half the information. Imagine if you’re trying to read a book and half the words were missing. It’s hard to get that big picture, what the book’s telling you. But if you understand how to read your financial statements, now you’re suddenly going to have so much clarity in your business and it’s going to make decisions so much easier to make. Best of all, we are more profitable than ever. We no longer need to put our personal funds in there.
Ariana:
Yay. Yay, double yay.
Tom:
Ariana is much happier. I mean, to be honest it’s a big difference from several years ago when we really didn’t look at the financials. Obviously the current day is much better than the previous times. If as we went through that you were nodding your head and saying, “Yes, I run into some of those challenges,” or, “We have to put our own money into businesses,” this is the episode for you. We really want to help you understand some of those common challenges and how you can make them better.
Ariana:
Here’s what we’re going to through today. We’re going to dive a little deeper into the problems that can occur, the top, the main ones that we’ve come up across when you aren’t leveraging your financials. Then we’re also going to share some solutions and then the impacts of making those changes that are going to help your business. With that let’s jump into the show, are you facing these business finance challenges?
Tom:
Top 5 challenges that small businesses encounter when they don’t know their financials. What’s number 1?
Ariana:
Number 1, you don’t find problems until it is too late.
Tom:
Yes, this is not a good one. I’m sure if you’re a small business owner you’ve probably been there.
Ariana:
Probably pretty common. Yeah.
Tom:
There’s a lot of problems that can exist in your business, and a lot of times financial statements will actually help you find those problems. The big problem that people have though is that they normally don’t look at their financial statements until the end of the year, if they look. A lot of times the only time they look is because an accountant says, “Hey you should probably look at this,” or you get to the end of the year and it’s like, “I thought we made money but we really didn’t.” This can ultimately cost you your business money and time.
Ariana:
Example of this, Warsaw Wine and Spirits, our wine and liquor store. Our first year in businesses our expenses were way, way higher than they should have been, but because we weren’t checking in on a week to week, or a month to month basis, we didn’t find this out until the end of the year when we did taxes and by that time it was too late to change anything.
Tom:
Yeah. We ended up, once we found that, we were able to look at our expenses and say, “How can we cut back on some of these expenses?” One of the examples was we had, our accountant actually do our payroll, that first year the accountant I think charged $2,400 to do our payroll plus our taxes.
Ariana:
Plus taxes, yeah.
Tom:
We shopped around and said, “What other options do we have?” We actually found a payroll company, Gusto.
Ariana:
Used to be ZenPayroll.
Tom:
Yep. I think it’s what, $24 base and then $4 per employee?
Ariana:
Yeah, I think they bumped it up to 6 per employee.
Tom:
Okay. Either way, we went from spending $200 a month to get our payroll done to just about $50 [inaudible 00:08:47]
Ariana:
We had to file sales tax on our own, which is not that hard.
Tom:
Yeah. Ultimately, that cut I think $800 or $1,200 a year from our expenses. That’s a great example of being aware of that, if we would have looked at that sooner we could have figured that out a couple months in and saved a good portion of that money instead of waiting for the entire year.
Another example from our real estate business was some of our early properties we spent a lot of money on the renovations. Basically when we started we didn’t properly analyse the properties to see how much money we would make depending on how much we put in, and then when we were doing renovations we also didn’t track our expenses. Ended up spending more money and then ultimately didn’t make as much money coming out of it because …
Ariana:
What’s the solution?
Tom:
Learn and read your financial statements and then make sure that you’re reviewing them periodically. If you don’t look at them today or if you only look at them once a year, try to at least start looking at them once a quarter. Then ideally as time goes on you’re moving that up, because the more often you look at them the faster you’re going to get that feedback. We like to look at things on a monthly basis, and then there’s some reports that we even look at on a weekly basis so that we can make adjustments.
Ariana:
Here are the impacts, you can start saving money by reducing those unnecessary expenses like we talked about before. You can also start to see those problems earlier and put measures in place to correct them. Example, if your sales are down you can kind of dive into, “Why are our sales down? What can we do to fix those sales?” Instead of being at the end of the year when you’ve already lost money you’d be doing this one month in and boost your sales back up to where they should be for the rest of the year. You can also identify those issues sooner. It could be difficult to remember what happened 6 months ago, some of us 6 days ago, but it’s much easier to remember what happened last week or in the last couple days.
Tom:
Yeah. That’s a great point, because there’s a lot of time where you’ll come back and say, “What was this thing?”
Ariana:
Yeah. What did I spend this on? You didn’t put it in your books correctly. Why were our sales so low this week?
Tom:
Exactly. If it was a long time ago, to be honest you’re probably not going to have a good answer. But if it was last week it’s like, “I bought this,” or, “This thing happened last week.”
Ariana:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, weather. A lot of times your sales will be down based on the weather. Why were our sales so low? If you’re looking at it weekly, there was a horrible snow storm last week, people couldn’t get out, that’s why our sales were low. Then the last impact is you can really run your business better since your problems are getting identified and resolved faster.
Tom:
Yeah, that’s a great one. Number 2, you don’t know if you have enough money month to month to cover. The problem is in business you guys have probably all heard this but, cash is king. It’s so true, but it’s not really that simple because you could be making enough cash but if it’s not at the right time you might go out of business before it ultimately comes to fruition.
Ariana:
Otherwise, you might not have enough cash to pay your bills, basically.
Tom:
Yeah. If you think about it, you might be making a lot of money towards the end of the year, but if a lot of your bills are due at the beginning of the year, you don’t have that money, you might not make to the end of the year.
Ariana:
Yeah. This may cause your business to fail, or you might have to put that personal savings money in, like were talking about. Again we have an example of this, we’re going to use one of our businesses, like always Warsaw Wine and Spirits. When we first opened, we opened in November, which is actually a really good time to open because it’s a busy time of year. But when we were doing our ordering for inventory we didn’t have any kind of budget in place, so we didn’t allocate in what we were spending for the sales tax that we would owe back, because in New York State you pay sales tax quarterly. We got to the next year and didn’t realize that December, January, February were all due in March. December is huge because it’s Christmas and New Year’s, and January and February are very slow, so we didn’t have a lot of sales in those slow months, but then in March we ended up having to pay the sales tax we owed from December, which was quite a large amount. We ended up once again having to take out of our personal savings to cover that.
Tom:
Yeah. There were 2 challenges there that I think you talked about. One was not really understanding how much sales tax had to come out each week in order for us to ultimately cover it, and then the second one was not realizing when that sales tax was due. If we had simply taken a step back and realized that it wasn’t due for January, February and March in April, but it’s actually due for December, January and February in March, those 2 things [crosstalk 00:13:29]
Ariana:
2 checks against us there. What’s the solution here?
Tom:
We want to create something called a cash flow forecast. It sounds complicated but it’s really not. Essentially what you’re going to do is you’re going to look at basically the cash that you’re expecting to come in during a certain period of time. Let’s take January, in January how much money do you anticipate coming into your business from sales or wherever else you’re going to have money come from, and then how much is going to out through expenses. You can start very simple and define this, and then as time goes on and you see your actual sales come in and your actual expenses go out, then you can make better adjustments and forecast for the future.
Ariana:
Okay the impact, by doing this you’re going to get a sense of the future is actually going to look like and you’re going to know which month that you’ll have extra cash and which months you may not have enough cash. Example, if you’re a retail business obviously the Holidays are going to be bigger for you than different times of year. That allows you to allocate some of that extra cash you get over the holidays to put aside for those slow times in your expenses.
Tom:
Yeah, and related to that this kind of gives you a crystal ball. It may be a little fuzzy but at least you can see a little bit into the future. There might be cases where once you put this forecast together you realize that, “Okay, the next 2 months we have extra money, but then the month after that we’re not going to have enough money.” It will either allow you to shift your purchases or reduce some expenses, or it may give you time to actually go out and find some additional funding, such as a line of credit or something from a bank, so that instead of last second you have to try to figure out how to cover that, you know several months ahead of time and can better plan for it.
Ariana:
Do you have an example?
Tom:
Funny you should ask.
Ariana:
I thought you might.
Tom:
It seems like we have examples for every [ones 00:15:17]. Hopefully you guys can learn from our mistakes because we’ve made just about every one of these mistakes. With our real estate business what we didn’t do in the past was really look ahead at what kind of renovations we have to make for our properties. When we buy properties we tend to renovate a lot of things at the beginning but there may be some large expenditures that we have to do throughout a year, for example replace a roof. If we don’t look ahead and say, “Okay, we anticipate having to replace 2 roofs this year,” when that comes up then we suddenly [have 00:15:48] to find money for it and it’s a little bit of a challenge.
Now what we do is we do a cash flow forecast out and we can, “We know we have to replace these 2 roofs, these are the time frame when we expect to do it, and here’s where the funding’s going to come from. That way, not only do we make sure that we have the finances in place, it also helps with our planning for the year when we know we’re going to do certain things, that we may need to bring, say contractors on to do that work.
Ariana:
Problem number 3, you may not be making enough marking on your products and services. This is another big one, especially if you are a retail type store because that’s a lot of the times when you do have to worry about those margins.
Tom:
With this, this is really any store because if you’re not selling a product you’re selling a service and you want to make sure that, I’ll let you go on but, essentially it applies across the board.
Ariana:
The problem here is, in order to have enough cash flow you need to make sure that you’re making enough margin on your products and services that you’re selling. If you’re not making enough margin you’re not going to have enough cash to cover your business expenses and still have a profit left over.
Tom:
It’s kind of the point I was going to, I’m sorry I jumped ahead a little bit. Different businesses have different business models. One example is Walmart. Everyone knows Walmart, their focus is selling things cheap. You can imagine that Walmart doesn’t have very large margins, they’re actually very low, but they make up for that by selling a lot of products. That’s their business model and they don’t have to have huge margins because they have volume. On the other end of the spectrum people might have heard of Lamborghini [car 00:17:27].
Ariana:
I hope so.
Tom:
Do you think they sell as many Lamborghinis as they sell the items at Walmart?
Ariana:
No.
Tom:
Probably not, but they have a much higher margin. They don’t sell a lot but when they do sell one they make a lot more money on that item. It’s important to understand your business strategy and then figure out what that mixture of margin and volume is that’s going to contribute to your success.
Ariana:
The solution here, easy one, figure out your profit margin. It might not be so easy to do, but if you watched a show like The Profit, that’s Tom’s favorite show by the way, one of the first questions that Marcus Lemonis asks business owners is about their margins.
Tom:
Yeah, this sounds complicated and once again I think a lot of people avoid doing this because they think it is complicated but figuring out your margins [are 00:18:15] pretty simple. Essentially what you’re going to do is determine what the cost is to buy the product that you’re going to sell, or to create the service that you’re going to sell, and then you want to figure out what you’re selling price is. Ultimately you’re going to subtract the cost from your selling price to get your gross profit, and then you’re going to divide that gross profit by the selling price to get your margin.
Ariana:
[inaudible 00:18:38] let’s have an example here.
Tom:
Yeah that probably sounded a little more complicated …
Ariana:
Because that sounded way more complicated. You said it was simple, it sounded complicated.
Tom:
All right, let’s say you’re selling t-shirts. It costs $10 to buy a t-shirt and then you’re going to sell them for 20. If we subtract the cost of the t-shirt from your selling price, the cost of the t-shirt is 10, the selling price is 20. 20 minus 10, we get a $10 profit, right?
Ariana:
Yes.
Tom:
We make $10 for every t-shirt we sell. Now if we go and divide that profit of $10 back into our selling price, we’ll get 50%, which is the margin that we made on that t-shirt. Does that make sense?
Ariana:
Yes, I think that simplified it a little bit for everyone.
Tom:
Okay. It’s also a little difficult to talk math over a podcast.
Ariana:
Yeah, yeah. We’ll leave it with that one.
Tom:
Yeah, and maybe we’ll actually link up to a margin calculator in the show notes.
Ariana:
That would probably be very nice.
Tom:
If you want to get a link to that head over to serialstartups.co/show27. With that, once you know your margin on your products what you ultimately want to do is figure out what is the average for your industry. You may not be able to find them but in a lot of cases you can, and then what you want to do is make sure that your margins are in line with your industry, or ideally higher.
Ariana:
Yeah.
Tom:
Then, there’s a lot of ways that you can ultimately get your margins there, but 2 of the basic examples are you can reduce how much you pay for your products or you can raise your prices. If we can order in bulk and get the $10 t-shirt order down to $8 per t-shirt, now we’re still going to make 2 more dollars. On the flip side if we can raise our prices from $20 to $25 per t-shirt, now we’re going to make an additional $5, or if we can do both now we make an additional $7.
Ariana:
The impact here, increasing your margins, it’s going to help all areas of your business, because you’re going to make more money per product or service sold, which is I’m going to give your business more operating capital so that you have more cash to run that business. We’re constantly looking at the margins in each of our businesses and looking for ways to improve them. Be it ordering in bulk and getting the cost down like Tom said, or raising the prices if we need to.
Tom:
Yeah. An example of that, once again going back to our real estate business. If you’ve listened to some of our previous podcast you know [inaudible 00:21:02]
Ariana:
I think he’s mentioned this one before.
Tom:
We have one paint color.
Ariana:
One.
Tom:
We buy them bulk and as a result we get a lower cost. It saves us money because when we have to have a tenant move out and then have a new tenant move in, we have the paint because we’ve ordered it in bulk. We also reduce our labor expenses because we don’t have to have someone go to the store and buy 3 different colors of paint. We don’t have to have them use 3 different brushes and clean each of the brushes, they can use 1 brush, 1 roller, they know the color of the paint. In some cases they don’t even have to paint all the rooms because they’re all the same color.
Ariana:
[inaudible 00:21:38] spot touch ups.
Tom:
Yeah. That’s just one out of many examples of how we can reduce our expenses, which is ultimately going to increase our margins.
Ariana:
All right, that brings us to problem number 4, you can’t grow with confidence. The problem here, just about every business decision has a financial impact. Without understanding your current business financials, it can make those decisions much more difficult to make, and additionally, you might be making poor business decisions and not even realize it.
Tom:
Why are you looking at me when you say that?
Ariana:
I did not look at you.
Tom:
Probably because I have done this countless times. Good thing is not much recently but when we first started it was like every week I was doing this.
Ariana:
I say nothing. I plead the fifth.
Tom:
The solution for this is you really want to learn to read at least the 3 main financial statements. I know this is a very challenging and intimidating topic, so what we’ve done is we’ve actually put together a free guide that shows in a very simple format what the 3 financial statements are and then a very introductory look at what they mean and what the stories that those tell for your business. If you’re interesting in getting that free download, head on over to the show notes at serialstartups.co/show27.
Ultimately once you know how to read your 3 financial statements, you want to be able to set up basically a schedule for when you’re going to look at those statements and then be able to use that schedule and looking at those statements to be able to make good business decisions bases on what you’re seeing in your statements.
Ariana:
For example, hiring employees is a very common thing that a lot of small business owners struggle with, because without knowing your numbers this decision can be very, very difficult. You don’t much how much it’s going to cost you to hire those people and to pay for them all year, insurance, payroll, all that. If you understand that total cost of hiring them and can project the additional sales or cost savings, it makes your decision that much easier to make, rather than just winging it and being like, “Well I think we can afford to hire 3 people but we’ll have to see as the year goes on.”
Tom:
Once again, why are you looking at me?
Ariana:
That one I totally didn’t mean to look at you.
Tom:
All right, the impact of this is, this is amazing I didn’t even think about it when I first started but, you can actually make business decisions much faster. An example of this is, for real estate I was realizing that I was running the same analysis over when we were looking at properties. I actually created a spreadsheet and said, “What are the key things that I look at? What’s the key information I need?” Once I had that spreadsheet made I can punch in a couple of numbers, and then I actually gave it the 3 criteria that I was looking at. After punching those numbers in it told me whether I should buy the property or not.
Ariana:
I think we offered that, didn’t we? As a real estate free download as well, the analyzing the property.
Tom:
Yeah. I’ll actually put a link to that in the show notes as well.
Ariana:
You know, just in case.
Tom:
Just in case you want to get in real estate. It’s amazing how once you figure out that process, once you know the key data that you’re looking for, once you have that data it makes it so much easier. Like I said I made it dummy proof where at the bottom of the sheet it was like if all 3 things are green, it pops up with a yes and says, “Buys this property, here’s the dollar amount you can buy it for.” If it didn’t make sense it popped up with a big red no and said, “No, don’t buy the property unless you want to go change some of the numbers.” Once you know that it makes your business decisions so much easier. Ultimately you’re going to make less mistakes and less mistakes typically mean more money.
Another example is we actually just had someone reach out to us and they said, “We know you have your liquor store in one location but we actually have another location that opened up and we think it would be great for you to move into this location.” What we’re ultimately going to do is we know our current numbers, what it takes to operate, what we pay for expenses, and what our sales are. Once we get some information from this other person, then we’ll be able to go evaluate and say, “Does that move make sense?” It’s going to be so much easier because we know our numbers.
Ariana:
All right, we are down to problem number 5, you have more stress than is needed. I don’t if stress is ever really needed. We should have rephrased that one.
Tom:
I don’t know, in some cases stress can motivate people.
Ariana:
I guess so, certain people, not me.
Tom:
A little bit of stress is good.
Ariana:
The problem, running a business can be stressful. If you don’t know your numbers you’re adding on to that stress and because of that your decisions are going to take more time and you’re more likely to make poor decisions. Solution? It’s an easy one.
Tom:
I said a whole bunch of stuff so I’m just going to repeat it, understand your financial statements. Sounds simple, but once you do like I said, decisions are going to be easier and it’s going to take a lot of that stress off your plate. The other thing with that is, you’re not going to struggle with having to worry about cash flow and questions of, “Can I make payroll?” Because you’re going to have those numbers and basically all the previous 4 things we talked about, they all become easier once you know those financial statements. When they become easier that means you have less stress.
Ariana:
Less stress in business will lead to less stress in your personal life, because we all it carries over. It’s impossible to keep that separate.
Tom:
Was that a happy wife, happy life [inaudible 00:27:03] I live by that motto.
Ariana:
I did not look at you for that one.
Tom:
I know.
Ariana:
It will also help you maintain, on that note, it will help you maintain those great relationships, either your spouse and your family and your employees. Go ahead and recap.
Tom:
Number 1.
Ariana:
You don’t find the problem until it’s too late. Often there are a lot of problems that can exist in your business but if you aren’t looking at your finances through the year, throughout the quarter, throughout the month, you’re going to miss those problems and that can cost you money, and sometimes have other implications. Solution, learn to read those financial statements and start reviewing them periodically.
Tom:
Yeah. Number 2, you don’t know if you have enough money to cover your expenses. The problem is cash comes in and out of your businesses at different times but if those times don’t line up you may not have enough cash. What you want to do is actually create something called a cash flow forecast so that you understand for different periods of time how much money are you thinking is going to come in, and then how much is going to go out.
Ariana:
Problem number 3, you may not be making enough margin on your products and services. In order to have enough cash flow you need to make sure that you’re making enough on whatever you’re selling. If you don’t have your margins high enough you won’t be able to have that cash to cover your business expenses and still make a profit. Solution, figure out your profit margin. If you remember like we talked about on the show, Tom’s favorite show is The Profit, so guess where that one came from.
Tom:
Yeah, I do like The Profit. Marcus is a serial entrepreneur so he’s close to my heart. He’s like an uber serial entrepreneur.
Ariana:
He is, yeah, way, way way uber serial entrepreneur.
Tom:
If you want to see our future just watch that show.
Ariana:
What?
Tom:
All right, on that problem number 4.
Ariana:
Problem number 4.
Tom:
Your business can’t grow with confidence. A lot of businesses fall into this kind of mom and pop phase where the business owners work in the business and they can never get passed a certain level. A lot of that has to do with not understanding the finances and being able to actually grow and make the decisions that you need. It’s just so much easier to do it yourself. Solution for that is if you understand your financial statements then as you’re looking for these opportunities to grow you can make sure that the numbers make sense and will support that growth.
Ariana:
Last, you have more stress than is needed. Basic, very simple problem, running a business is stressful. If you don’t know your numbers you’re just adding to that stress. Solution, learn to read your 3 financial statements.
Tom:
All right, tip of the week.
Ariana:
Tip of the week. Obviously as we know financials are not always fun. I definitely am not a financials person, but it is imperative that you know the basics to run your business, or if you can’t possible bring yourself to do it find someone you trust to do it for you. This week we challenge you to learn something new today by downloading our free guide to understanding those financial statements.
Tom:
Yeah. We went a little bit longer on the show today but there was a lot to get through, and this is such an important topic. Just know that we actually have 2 more shows coming up. The next one we’re actually going to walk through those 3 financial statements, and really make sure that you understand what each one is, how to initially read it, and then that can be your starting point for then looking at the numbers in your business and hopefully having some of the success that we’ve had by looking at that. As a reminder if you want to get the free download that we’re talking about in preparation for our show next week, you can head over to serialstartups.co/show27.
Ariana:
I think that’s our show for this week. Thanks for listening guys.
Tom:
All right have a great week guys.
Ariana:
Bye. Like our podcast? We’d love for you to leave us a review on iTunes. Know someone who’s thinking about starting their own business? Please share this with them so we can help them on their entrepreneurial path. Entrepreneur Jim Rohn once said, “You are the average of the 5 people that you spend the most time with.” If you want to be a successful entrepreneur then you need to surround yourself with other successful entrepreneurs, but you may not know how or have other entrepreneurs in your area. That is why we created the Serial Startups community, which is a free private Facebook group for entrepreneurs to gather, ask questions, share their experiences and grow one more successful businesses. Head on over to sscommunity.co now to request your free access.
The post 5 Challenges of Not Knowing Your Business Financials appeared first on Serial Startups.
