I recently did a speech on the 5 simple strategies to keeping more money in your business. In preparing for this speech I determined that 3 of those strategies were the MOST important.
1. Re-aligning your goals.
It is important to determine the direction your business is going and gain clarity on why your business is stagnate. Is the direction your business is headed aligned with your goals? When you established your business, you had a goal in mind that revolves around how successful you wanted this business to be. As you begin to build your business, things change. We all start with one business idea and goal in mind and in most cases after working in your business for a while, a shift a occurs. And what happens next is what causes a business to become stagnate. The business will start to grow and then level off because the goals that were originally established are no longer in alignment with the direction the business is now headed. By aligning your business with your goals, you ensure that you are working towards you ultimate goal. This will help you set your business up on the path to success. You can’t be a heart surgeon working as a mechanic or a landscaper fixing someone’s roof. You may be able to perform both of these jobs well and you may very well be good at it; but you can’t build a successful business doing both. The goal of one is not the goal of the other.
2. Relinquishing control of tasks that are keeping your business from generating any profit.
The key to growing your business is to be able to work ON your business and not IN your business. The only way to do that is to focus on activities that generate income. These types of activities include meeting with clients, writing a blog and networking. All of these, plus more, have a much higher chance of generating income by leading to a new client than say filing papers. All administrative tasks should be outsourced or delegated to someone else who specializes in those areas. Preparing information for clients should be delegated to an administrative assistant. Website upkeep should be delegated to a virtual assistant or web designer, depending on what needs to be done. And a bookkeeping should be outsources to an accountant, whether internal or external. Once you take the step to remove these tasks from your daily activities, you will have more time to focus on what really matters – and that is the core mission of your business; your true passion.
3. Eliminating cash exhausting matters from your business.
The two MAIN things that remove the most cash from a business unnecessarily are debit cards and co-mingling of funds. You know how when you go to college you parents tell you “don’t apply for any credit cards.” And somehow you do anyway and before you know if you are knee deep in debt with no job to pay for it. Oh did that only have to me? It’s the same thing with getting a debit card in a business. Until you are an established business, and by that I mean been in business for a few years and have generated a few hundred thousand in gross revenue, you SHOULD NOT, I repeat SHOULD NOT get a debit card or credit card that is linked directly to you main business bank account. And even then you should not get one unless you have serious self control. You see what happens is you go swipe crazy. And because of the way the world is going, people don’t write checks anymore for purchases they just swipe, and swipe and swipe. And before you know it, they have overdrawn their bank account not once, not twice but multiple times.
The second mistake is that business owners will use business funds for personal matters. Shopping and trying to pass it off as gifts; groceries and trying to pass them off as office expense; meals and travel and trying to pass them off as business meetings. I HAVE SEEN IT ALL – trust me when I tell you.
The reason these two matters need to be eliminated is because they suck all the cash out of your business and quickly. I already mentioned the overdraft fees that incur and in addition, you are spending cash on things that are not related to your business. And unless you want the IRS to come knocking at your door and hit you with a FAT penalty assessment it needs to stop.
What strategies are you using to keep more money in your business?
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