Your business is making profits, but where is the cash? It seems that someone has taken away your money. Your bank account is still the same, and your personal wealth is still the same. There must be someone that took your money. Based on my over 18 years of professional experience and study, there are 8 persons that take away your money without your knowing... The First Person is YOU Yes, if you do not have accountability, you have taken away your own money! According to NLP experts, 95% of the people in this world live their live below the line. They blame others for their own problems, come up with excuses and worst of all, deny what they are doing is their fault. Sounds too common? Many people blame the government, blame the economy, and blame the VAT or GST (tax) increase etc for their business woes. The remaining 5% of the people (successful people) live their live above the line. They take ownership of their situation, take responsibility for their actions, and be accountable to themselves. The Second Person is Your Lack of Planning Yes, if you have no planning, or you are simply reacting to everyday challenges, you're simply taking away your own money! To take back your money, respond, don't react. You can choose to over-respond if you like. Like faced with a new competitor, you can simply react by cutting your price, or you can over-respond by always maintaining a USP so that there is no real competitor. The Third Person is Your Customers We all know that customers that don't pay are simply taking money from your pocket and putting it into their own bank account. The best is to have no credit policy, and even collect cash in advance. The Fourth Person is Your Suppliers Suppliers often take away your money by giving you lousy service, noncompetitive products and worst of all, sell you extra stocks! So have a JIT (just-in-time) system for purchasing and inventory, and you'll take the money back from your suppliers. The Fifth Person is your Staff If you only have staff and not team, you're working for your staff for free! Staffs are simply reactive people on your payroll that you need to continuously ensure that they do their work, especially when you're not around. Team are those that work as though they're working for their own company. You need to build winning teams or you'd end up with losing money. The Sixth Person is your Marketing If you are like most people who believe that marketing will generate you name recognition, and once you have name recognition, customers will come to you, you're throwing away money for good. Marketing must be Profitable Marketing, i.e. it generates you profit every time you do it. The Seventh Person is your Accounts (or your lack of understanding of accounts). Many people don't know how to read Balance Sheet, and can't figure out what is a cash flow Statement. Lack of understanding of accounting can pull you down as you could be doing things that wrong and not know it. The Eight Person is your Selling If you are like most people still relying on providing answers in your selling, you're missing a lot. The only way to sell is to ask questions. |
