Management Training
One-on-One personal coaching for business owners
Most companies are started by one or two individuals...
with a lot of experience in manufacturing and/or sales,very little experience in administration or finance and
even less experience in how to manage a business through rapid growth.
This inexperience limits how big or how profitable their business will be.
With a small amount of intensive management training, this limitation disappears.
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This is what I do for you as a business client...
I show you how to use financial knowledge to more effectively manage your business.(Less than 10% of independent business owners get the kind of information from their accounting system that they can manage their company with.)
I show you how to understand outsiders' views of your company, and how to use that understanding to get what you want from them. This includes bankers, vendors and competitors.
Actual examples from my work logs...
"I had lunch with a prospective client who did not understand why his banker would not even consider a line of credit for his company, despite several years of profitability shown on his tax returns. I told him it was almost certainly caused by the large amount of payroll taxes that he owed the IRS. He was dumbfounded, and swore that he owed the IRS nothing, because he used a nationwide payroll service that automatically deposited the taxes each payday. Where did I come up with such nonsense?
I showed him his balance sheet; it listed over $50,000 in tax liability and got bigger every month. He just shrugged and said, 'Who pays attention to that crap? I haven't looked at it in years.'
'Your banker', I told him."
He finally admitted that he didn't know how to read a balance sheet.
The problem turned out to be a low paid but loyal bookkeeper who didn't know how to post payroll properly; in fact, she didn't know much about accounting, period. In studying the problem, we determined that he had several other significant errors in his reporting. When we corrected the accounting problems, the bank gave him the line of credit he needed.
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Second Example:
"I walked into the new client's business expecting it to be a simple marketing development project. Before I take on any client, though, I always read their financial statements, because that's an x-ray of the company and tells me a lot about their management.
Within five minutes of sitting with their Controller I discovered that he was creating receivables against purchase orders as much as 8 weeks before shipping the materials, then discounting those receivables with the factoring division of their small country bank -- about $240,000 worth -- to manage the company's cash flow problems. In other words, the receivables he was discounting were not legitimate because the material had not yet shipped.
I immediately told the owner that he had a fraud problem that involved a federally insured institution, and that I recommended solving that problem before attempting any new marketing program. since this was big time trouble for him if the bank discovered it.
Before we met with the banker two days later, we had developed a workable plan that only needed the banker's concurrence. But the banker hesitated and got belligerent. So I showed him that he had sent them a letter forcing the company into the bank's factoring division -- increasing their borrowing rate by more than 5% -- 'because their debt/equity ratio was bad'.
What he had overlooked was that the company's balance sheet showed the debt they had on their land and buldings, but not the corresponding assets, automatically making the ratios bad.
I told him it wouldn't sound good in court that he had forced the company's owners into a situation that they didn't understand, and then wouldn't work with them to solve the problem... Especially since the bank had financed their land and buildings, too, and it was obvious that the bank was so anxious to flip high-margin business to their new factoring unit that they totally ignored the facts.
After a few minutes reflection, he quickly agreed, and we were then free to make the marketing changes we wanted."
I train:
Effective goal setting and developing a plan that will reach those goals.
Project management using computer tools for greater efficiency. How to spot employees who prevent growth and what actions you can take.
How to make your own management time more efficient.
How to build a stronger management team to support you.
