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 […]
March Reading
Coastliners: a novel by Joanne Harris. Another of the Gretchin Rubin happy novels. This one at least has a happy ending. The Sentamentalists: a novel by Johanna Skibsrud. Published here in Kentville at Gaspereau Press and winner of the Giller Prize. I didn’t get all of it, but I still enjoyed it. How to Be […]
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 […]
Keep Going
I watched Bourne Identity over the weekend. One of the things that really struck me was that he didn’t stop. Before we get going here, I recognize this is a movie and therefore may be somewhat artificial, but A) I’ve seen how this works in real life and B) I’ll take lessons from Bourne any […]
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 […]