e-lifeandwork: Learn New Skills Online | Online Courses & Real-World

The new year is a great time to help your business clients reflect on the past 12 months and strategize new ways to improve their bottom lines. This means giving them a deep analysis of their finances over the past fiscal year to help them understand the causes of any financial shortcomings and notable sales trends. More important, it is paramount that you help them pinpoint new ways to boost overall profits. If you can help your business clients discover new tactics to maximize their profits, you’ll set them up for greater success and growth. In my experience as the CEO and founder of CMA Exam Academy (a Certified Management Accountant exam review program), I have discovered some useful ways companies can ramp up their profits. Help Them Locate Waste in Each Business Process As they go through their day-to-day, your clients may not even know that costly waste is happening all over their enterprise. From too much manpower in a delivery fleet to wasted raw materials in a product...

Small business owners calculating their monthly cashflow. In a meeting last week, a successful serial entrepreneur, who wants to shift to becoming a full-time investor, remarked that they were going back to school to get an MBA at the age of 45. I asked, why? The answer was surprising to me. Even though this entrepreneur had built several companies (north of $50 million in annual revenue) they felt inadequate as a potential investor. Specifically, they cited an inability to read company financial statements, including a balance sheet, etc. in order to determine a company’s health and value. This made me stop and think. How many other entrepreneurs or small business owners really understand how to read and utilize financial statements or even critical finance metrics in order to determine a company’s health and financial worth? In my career of building a $1 billion company and managing four company turnarounds, I found the following financial metrics below to be invaluab...

Post-COVID-19, the future of working capital management has changed. Last year, supply chain complexity, inventory buffers, and loss of negotiating power all crimped many companies’ ability to reduce their working capital effectively. The height of the pandemic in 2020 also exposed weaknesses in supply chains. All those factors will increase the focus on how companies can improve working capital efficiency in 2021. In general, this year working capital management won’t be about squeezing suppliers on terms. For the 1,000 U.S. companies in the CFO/The Hackett Group Working Capital Scorecard, days payable outstanding (DPO, the number of days companies take to pay their suppliers)  increased by 7.6% in 2020, to an all-time high of 62.2 days, up from 57.8 days in 2019. (See chart below.) (For more on the scorecard’s results, see Thursday’s story, Working Capital: A Tumultuous Year.) The biggest opportunities to improve working capital now are those components that lockdowns hit...

When it comes to working capital, every rand is a soldier. Meaning that every cent you spend needs to go to battle for you and work as hard as it possibly can. Dov Girnun, founder and CEO of alternative finance provider, Merchant Capital, says that many small businesses are changing their day-to-day behaviours in order to leverage working capital effectively across their business, making them top performers in their respective industries. “Putting some fundamentals in place gives your company the best chance of unlocking the most working capital, but it also requires discipline and implementing behavioural change at a company culture level.” SA retail sales jump 95.8% in April Stats SA reports that South Africa's retail trade sales retail trade sales increased by 95.8% year on year in April 2021... 17 Jun 2021 Below, Girnun outlines the four key strategies that can help your business maximise working capital and make the most of this ripe retail trajectory. 1. Inv...