Few things will kill a business faster than lack of cash. Even once profitable businesses can fail when they run short of the cash they need to sustain operations. Your responsibility as the business owner is to make sure the business has the cash it needs. The goal is to increase the cash coming in and to decrease the cash going out, which can be accomplished using a simple tool called a Cash Plan. A Cash Plan is a cash flow statement that includes forecasts of receipts and disbursements expected in upcoming months. This is a crucial document that a business must develop and use to keep its cash flow healthy. A diligent business owner always knows their current cash position. Q: How can a Cash Plan be created? A: W ...

Roy is the owner of a small company that sells and installs hot tubs. While he has tripled his sales in just a ten month period, he now doesn't have enough cash to keep the business growing. How can this be? The simple answer is that many of Roy's customers haven't paid their bills on time, and he lacks a system to handle delinquent accounts. Like many small business owners, Roy saw collections as a part of the business process that would eventually take care of itself. "I hate pressing people for money," he explains. "I just thought, naively I guess, that if we did everything else right - if we generated leads, converted them to customers, and delivered the right product at the right price - then surely we'd get paid." Roy is learnin ...

Success Strategies for Selling Your Business Today's edition of The National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship highlights a new collection of articles titled, Ready To Sell Your Business?, which are available on the Kauffman eVenturing website. The articles are written by financial experts and entrepreneurs who have successfully sold companies. Viewing your business as an investment, and learning about selling it, is critical for prospective sellers as well as business owners that are hoping to develop their business into a saleable asset in the future. Click here to read the latest collection of articles. ...

The Embark E-Learning Money Course has been launched and is on sale now! The last of the seven course Embark E-Learning curriculum "the Money Course" has now been launched and is available for purchase. We have worked hard to ensure that the course content is presented in a way that any business owner can understand. We have included more content and more depth for a substantial course that will enable you to understand the financial side of your company, including: how to obtain and control the movement of money within the business, and how to understand and manage your company’s financial value. Because of the robustness of the Money Course, the individual course purchase price has increased from $199 to $299. I ...

How do you decide what to charge for your product or service? The specifics will be different for every business, but it comes down to one thing: VALUE. If your customers can see the value of buying your product or service, they'll happily pay the price. If they don't see that value, it makes little difference how low you set your price, the customer will look somewhere else for the perceived value, even if "somewhere else" costs more than your product or service! Too many small business owners are working far too hard and charging far too little for their product or service. In most cases, they have no idea what sets them apart from their competition. They don't know what they do better or what their competitors do better. An ...

Like it or not, money is a subject that seems to be ever-present in the mind of the business owner. We talk about it, we think about it, we worry about it. We plan for what we'll do when we have plenty of it, and we reveal our fears, frustrations, and resourcefulness when we don't have enough of it. Why is it then, with all this energy around money, so few of us ever seem to have it really handled? What is it about money that is so elusive, so complicated, so difficult to control? All you need is a commitment to two simple things: Understanding the relationship between money and your business activities Creating and implementing, on a regular, on-going basis, a few money management tools and strategies. Your Business Is More than ...