What can a business financial coach do for you?
That’s a good question!
First of all, they help define where you are. We create your cash flow, income statement, and balance sheet to give you the organized, raw data. We spend lots of time digging through papers and finding out just where you stand. Who owes you money. Who do you owe money to. How much are your assets worth. What do your income streams look like. How much is labor costing you. Basically, where did your money come from and where is it going to. Many folks are perfectly capable of doing this themselves and some just need a framework to hang all the information on.
Next, you get an objective look at your finances. We look at your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). This is where our experience pays off. Do you have strong sales and weak cost control? Do you have strong margins or are they tight? Perhaps you have a strong debt position and a weak cash flow. Maybe your sales are strong, but collections are weak.
Third, we help you fix the weaknesses and exploit your strengths. It may be that we improve a weak cash flow by opening a line of credit. Build up cash reserves to help with seasonal sales fluctuations. Implement cost control measures to increase margins. There are countless tools at your fingertips to develop a solution to your unique situation.
Fourth, we develop key metrics for you to monitor of your business. Leading indicators that give you enough time to adjust course before damage is done. It may be daily sales, customers per month, average sales per customer, billable hours percentage, or average cost of production. Every business is different, but we help you identify what to monitor to stay healthy.
What to expect
During a financial coaching review, we dig into the numbers behind your business. No cookie cutters, just good old-fashioned elbow grease. Coaching sessions can be a onetime session to get an outside perspective on a project or they can be ongoing sessions driving continuous improvement. Depending on your goals and time frame, we may meet weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Sessions can be a broad overview for a fresh viewpoint once a quarter, or very detailed to answer specific questions. We use our experience to help you develop the business processes and metrics to ensure your success.
Ultimately, our goal is to work ourselves out of a job, training you to monitor and understand your financials so that you become self-reliant.
How to Prepare for our Initial Free Consultation
Before we can help you, we need to understand your business and goals. Be prepared to answer these questions.
- Tell me about your business! Customers, vendors, and employees; what services/products do you provide; why do you do what you do?
- What made you call us? Proactivity, expansion, loan prep, cash flow, profitability, selling business, retirement, taxes?
- What are your plans and goals for the next year and beyond – marketing, financial, growth, new production lines or products…
Should you decide to continue:
Every client has different goals, but we like to let folks know up front what information is needed for a financial analysis and what they will have at the end of the process. Some of you have a vast majority of this information in QuickBooks, some have it in a shoe box.
Finances Data Collection (Don’t worry, we have Excel spreadsheets for this!)
- Balance Sheet (Found in QuickBooks, AR, AP, RE Tax Schedules, Appraisals)
- Assets
- Liabilities
- Income Statement (Found in QuickBooks or Past Taxes)
- Income
- Expenses
- Cash Flow (Found in QuickBooks or Check Register)
With this information and answers from a few other questions, we work our magic and transform raw data into useful information and metrics to manage your business.
What you walk away with:
- Current Financial Statements – Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow
- Financial Ratio Analysis identifying strengths and weakness with specific recommendations to improve your business
- Cash Flow Budget Spreadsheet tailored to meeting goals
- Financial Plan detailing projections, assumptions, and goals
- Key Metrics to monitor and control your business
- Knowledge of how to objectively look at your financial statements
Your needs may exist outside this list, but this is a starting point on your road to success.