"Business Management" Posts

Many entrepreneurs and top executives are fortunate enough to achieve early business success. However, to sustain growth and enjoy real long-term success in a global economy, it is important to follow a guideline. Long-term business success is tied to three key factors — cash flow, profitability and ease of operations.

1. Develop a strategic plan. The first move toward developing a strategic plan is a difficult one. Many business owners fall victim to measuring success by how hard they are working and whether there is enough money to cover payroll. In reality, businesses operate best with a plan and methodology …

Game plan

Business owners whose primary expertise lies in technical applications rather than strategy tend to make decisions based on expediency and personal experience. In many cases, however, these owners don’t have all the facts on which to base sound decisions.

There are two possible reasons for this oversight. One, they have not identified the key operational matrices of the company. Or, two, if they have identified the matrices, they cannot ascertain the key facts that compose them because they lack the systems, methodologies and procedures for daily tracking.

A business that doesn’t have all the facts is like a …

In order to define success in any entrepreneurial environment, one must first acknowledge that the ultimate goal is to stimulate the economy and have a positive impact on as many lives as possible. Every entrepreneur has an obligation to impact the lives of all who come in contact with them. This includes employees, their families, customers, vendors, lenders, suppliers and all others that derive a pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefit from that enterprise.

The best way to define a thriving business is to say that the owner has the same responsibility as the leader of a town, municipality or small city. …

We have all heard that “human nature” is one of the reasons we resist change. Reasons are better described as excuses, and business owners can’t afford excuses.

Complacency is a business killer, but fear not. Help is there, if you are willing to accept it. The next phone call, or knock on your door, just might be the answer to your problem.

Fear of the unknown
Change creates anxiety. You can reduce the anxiety for the short term by resisting change. Without change, anxiety from business problems will consume you and doom your business to failure. Don’t fear failure. Instead, …

Every business owner is confronted at some point during their business life with defining what is most important to them in running their business. The deeper we contemplate how to define success, the more we realize that success is a three pronged process.

The first and most important prong in defining success is how we reach the point of maximizing our cash flow in order to manage our business for profit, rather than manage for cash flow. Too many business owners spend the majority of their time worrying about how they are going to pay their bills rather than being …

For years the notion of “Made in China” has been a contentious sourcing alternative. Today, for small businesses it has become an absolute imperative to engage in the global economy in order to survive locally.

Under current market environments, many small business owners are disillusioned about the prospect of moving some or all of their manufacturing to China. They fear the unknown and the unfamiliar. However, the reality remains that in order to endure in the new global market economy we must re-evaluate and reengineer our sourcing and procurement strategies.

As a business owner, can you imagine paying an employee …

There are many text book examples of formulas and various CFO philosophic differences regarding cash flow that I could review, but the relational processes that cash flow has on business are where many entrepreneurs lose their way and need guidance.

It is a simple fact that all human beings need nutrition to survive. The nutrition ingested as food is rapidly consumed as fuel. If you impede this nutrition for a significant amount of time, you will starve to death. The rule is simple—consumption must be balanced with replenishment in order to maintain stasis. The same applies to your company. Businesses …

The early warning signs & a 7-step recovery program

All too often it isn’t until a business owner is faced with dire consequences that he/she is willing to admit ‘the business is in serious trouble.’ Don’t be confused — I am not talking about snags, hitches, setbacks, hindrances, quandaries, predicaments, obstacles or dilemmas. These difficulties are the daily stock-in-trade of all business owners. However, left unattended, they are the precursors of crisis. To state the obvious, the problem with ignoring, or delaying, the process of dealing with business difficulties is—the longer the delay, the longer it will take to resolve …