I’ve been writing this blog post for a few weeks now and it has bottle-necked any other post from coming along. Know what I mean? Today I read the Transitions are Tough post by Christine Gilbert on her blog Almost Fearless. She, her husband and their 18 mo baby are traveling the world. Something I […]
You are browsing archives for
Category: Know Where You Are Going
Business as Experiment
I haven’t been here for a while. I’ve been doing. TEDxNovaScotia, growing Crystal Clear Bookkeeping to 3 full-time people (I’m aiming for 5 by the end of the year) and starting a new venture: Repair-Share. That hasn’t left me much time for reflecting, let alone writing. It’s funny how much I’ve started noticing people expressing […]
Minimum Standard is Not a Brand
Your customers should be able to expect that you fulfill your promise of doing your business competently. That includes having the best products you can find, reasonable pricing, good customer service, fast, reliable, cheerful, careful, complete etc, etc. It’s only if you go a step beyond, to something that your competitors don’t do that you […]
April is Branding Month
Brands: as in who people think you are, rather than who you think they should think you are. These days of transparency it is who you are authentically that matters. There I used all the rhetoric words for brand. Despite the over-used words, the concept holds. Brands used to be what the marketing department wanted […]
It’s the End of Numbers Month
How did you do? We talked about time, economics and about the value of the information in your financial statements. If you would like to discuss your financial statements, get in touch and I’ll be happy to talk shop with you. One of the most powerful time tools I have in my arsenal is systems. […]
To Everything There is a Time
To everything there is a season. We gather information, processes it/think it through, and act on it. GATHER During gather time, I read, listen to interviews, watch videos and movies and talk to everyone I meet. This is a rich, productive discussion and sharing time. I share what I find and my initial thoughts. Processing […]
What I look for right now on my Financia...
When I look at the statements for my bookkeeping company every month, I’m looking for several things: Did I make a profit? In a service business, you should pretty much expect to make a profit from the get go. What’s my gross margin*? For a service business, I like to see between 40-60%. Some business […]
Financial Statements
The new workbook is posted under the members tab. Here is a synopsis. Your Profit & Loss tells you how much money you brought in, how much you paid for expenses and how much was left. Your Balance Sheet tells you what you have or own in the business and how you paid for it. […]
Other Numbers of Business
This month we are looking at the numbers of business. I don’t intend for us to get too deeply into any particular numbers, rather that we get familiar with them and, more importantly, comfortable with them. Numbers are the language of business. We use numbers all the time to talk about time, for instance and […]
Economics and Small business
The term economics refers to the study of the movement of money at the population level. Economics looks at the aggregate of all the grocery shopping (for instance) by everyone and makes inferences and predictions based on how much, how often or how little we spend as a group. What does that have to do […]