Making Money

If you were driving 80 miles an hour, in the dark, with your lights off, heading towards a cliff, would you like someone to yell, STOP?  

OK.

Stop!

Do you produce financial reports the "balance sheet and income statement" every week?  Do you understand financial reports?  Do you analyze sales, costs, cash flow, and debt every week?  If not, you may be heading for the cliff.

STOP.  And find out.

A Known Financial Position - KFP - is essential to your success and profitability. Known” is the key element.  It may be that you are losing money, or deeper in debt than you would like to be.  Find out how much and how deep.  That's the starting place.  The financial reports are the Scorecards in the game of business.  You can always improve the score.  But you must know where you are right now.

This seems obvious.  But from my experience as a business consultant, nine out of 10 business owners don't know where they stand financially.  There are a couple of reasons for this. 

• They don''t know how to keep score.
• They are afraid to look, because they don''t want to know how bad it is.

Learning how to keep score is the focus of the Making Money section of The Bare Bones Biz Fitness Plan.   

You'll be at a Known Financial Position when:

• You can generate Income Statement and Balance Sheet reports and trust that the information is current and accurate.
• You can go through the reports line by line, account by account, and understand what each dollar amount represents.