Is Your Business Growing Broke?
The number 1 reason for growing small businesses to fail is that they run out of cash!
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It’s not because they have poor products or services – most were previously very successful and profitable. It’s because they don’t understand the cash conversion cycle and when a business wants to grow and scale it requires a lot of cash!
Growth Sucks Cash Bigtime!
Once you understand what your cash conversion cycle is (in days), you can reduce it and grow the business at a sustainable rate.
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The problem areas below result in a company not generating enough GROSS MARGIN DOLLARS and CASHFLOW to fund the growth of the business and scale-up.
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Don't understand what the numbers are telling you.
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Product or service pricing and mix not set to the optimum level
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Customers take too long to pay, suppliers require payment upfront - stretching your cash cycle.
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Too much debt
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Poor labour efficiency and utilisation
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Accounting system not set up correctly to provide the right information to make better business decisions.
Solution
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Keep It Simple
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Keep Growing
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Grow Profitability
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You can take action by implementing the 7 Financial Levers below to increase your cash flow and reduce your cash conversion cycle days. Start with the easiest one first!
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Increase your prices.
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Increase your sales volume.
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Reduce your Cost Of Goods Sold (COGS).
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Reduce your overheads.
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Reduce your debtor days.
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Reduce your stock days.
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Increase your creditor days.
The cash conversion cycle is the number of days from when you first spend cash on a job for a customer to the day you receive payment for it.
In the example below, a business would need to fund it’s own operating expenses for over 6 weeks. If average weekly expenses were $ 10,000 it would need $64,285 in the bank to survive.
Spend Cash on Customer Job
DAY 1
Complete Customer Job
DAY 14
Invoice Customer 30 day terms
DAY 15
Customer Pays Invoice due date
DAY 45
If you need help implementing any of the 7 Financial Levers, or would like to engage a Management Accountant to guide your business back into the black...
Your Cash Conversion Cycle is 45 Days