Master Delegator Podcast

Ep 184 - How to Improve Your Cash Flow in 2024

February 05, 2024 Kristy Yoder
Ep 184 - How to Improve Your Cash Flow in 2024
Master Delegator Podcast
More Info
Master Delegator Podcast
Ep 184 - How to Improve Your Cash Flow in 2024
Feb 05, 2024
Kristy Yoder

Send us a Text Message.

Unlock the secrets to financial agility and discover how virtual assistants can revolutionize your cash flow management!

In our latest Master Delegator podcast episode, we're joined by Alex Little, a finance and accounting dynamo, who shares invaluable insights into the world of fractional CFOs. For businesses generating between $500,000 and $50 million annually, this could mean the difference between a ledger in the red and one flourishing in the black. We go beyond the numbers to explore the fundamental strategies that help in actively managing your cash flow, ensuring that you're not just sending invoices, but also diligently collecting them.

Our conversation with Alex takes a deep dive into the tactical maneuvers of cash flow forecasting and the art of building an emergency fund. We know the struggle of balancing the books while trying to scale your business, and that's why we lay out the steps to achieve financial health without sacrificing growth.

From diversifying your revenue streams to embracing adaptable payment processing systems, we cover the arsenal of tools needed to navigate the ebb and flow of business finances.

Moreover, Alex and I reveal how the strategic use of virtual assistants can streamline operations and amplify your cash management, allowing you to focus on what you do best – growing your company.

Whether you're just starting or looking to elevate your business, we invite you to join us on the Master Delegator podcast. Tune in, equip yourself with expert advice, and transform your approach to financial management. Remember, your journey to profitability is just a play button away, and we're here to accompany you every step of the way.

Learn more about Alex Little here:
https://www.littlecfoservices.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamalexlittle/



The Digital Revolution Podcast
Welcome to The Digital Revolution Podcast, where marketing experts share their expertise.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

PodMatch
PodMatch Automatically Matches Ideal Podcast Guests and Hosts For Interviews

Support the Show.

Are you in need of any assistance? Are you tired and running out of time? It's time to start looking for a virtual assistant! Learn how to get your freedom and life back by visiting smartvirtualassistants.com


Be part of our Facebook community page for entrepreneurs who want to become a master delegator.


Do you want to learn how to hire a virtual assistant? Access our free training.

Master Delegator Podcast
Become a supporter of the show and get a shoutout in an upcoming episode!
Starting at $3/month
Support
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Send us a Text Message.

Unlock the secrets to financial agility and discover how virtual assistants can revolutionize your cash flow management!

In our latest Master Delegator podcast episode, we're joined by Alex Little, a finance and accounting dynamo, who shares invaluable insights into the world of fractional CFOs. For businesses generating between $500,000 and $50 million annually, this could mean the difference between a ledger in the red and one flourishing in the black. We go beyond the numbers to explore the fundamental strategies that help in actively managing your cash flow, ensuring that you're not just sending invoices, but also diligently collecting them.

Our conversation with Alex takes a deep dive into the tactical maneuvers of cash flow forecasting and the art of building an emergency fund. We know the struggle of balancing the books while trying to scale your business, and that's why we lay out the steps to achieve financial health without sacrificing growth.

From diversifying your revenue streams to embracing adaptable payment processing systems, we cover the arsenal of tools needed to navigate the ebb and flow of business finances.

Moreover, Alex and I reveal how the strategic use of virtual assistants can streamline operations and amplify your cash management, allowing you to focus on what you do best – growing your company.

Whether you're just starting or looking to elevate your business, we invite you to join us on the Master Delegator podcast. Tune in, equip yourself with expert advice, and transform your approach to financial management. Remember, your journey to profitability is just a play button away, and we're here to accompany you every step of the way.

Learn more about Alex Little here:
https://www.littlecfoservices.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamalexlittle/



The Digital Revolution Podcast
Welcome to The Digital Revolution Podcast, where marketing experts share their expertise.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

PodMatch
PodMatch Automatically Matches Ideal Podcast Guests and Hosts For Interviews

Support the Show.

Are you in need of any assistance? Are you tired and running out of time? It's time to start looking for a virtual assistant! Learn how to get your freedom and life back by visiting smartvirtualassistants.com


Be part of our Facebook community page for entrepreneurs who want to become a master delegator.


Do you want to learn how to hire a virtual assistant? Access our free training.

Speaker 1:

And I know the sounds biased and self-serving, but the virtual assistance isn't the same realm as fractional, just like myself, where a fractional CFO is a chief financial officer that helps on the financial strategy of the business. But I work with businesses that are in the 500,000 annual revenue to 50 million annual revenue stage, to where they've grown enough, to where they have those larger problems that they need that high level support on, but they're not making enough money to support a full time $300,000 chief financial officer.

Speaker 2:

Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to Master Delegator Podcast, the podcast that unveils the secrets of effective delegation and productivity for business growth. My name is Christy Yoder, ceo of SmartVAs and Meet5StarVAs, and your podcast host. Can I tell you a secret? I am obsessed with teamwork and delegation. I consider myself a lazy entrepreneur, not because I don't like working, but because I always find ways to do things in the most effective and easiest way. I was born and raised in Manila, philippines, moved to the States and grew my agency from one person to more than 70 plus team members. As of this recording, I was able to grow my business 10 times more after I hired my first virtual assistant within three months. Together with my team, we have helped more than 300 stress and overwhelm business owners scale their businesses by delegating to virtual assistants, and that's why my goal in this podcast show is to help you grow your business by giving you fresh perspectives on delegation, outsourcing, hiring virtual assistants and up to date proven business strategies, and teaching you how to scale your business while living a freedom-filled lifestyle. Whether you're a business leader, entrepreneur or someone striving for peak efficiency, this podcast is your go-to resource. We bring you insights from industry experts, successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders who have mastered the skill of delegation. If you are ready to elevate your productivity and achieve more by doing less, you're in the right place. Subscribe to Master Delegator on your favorite podcast platform and join our community of proactive delegators. Now let's get started on the path to becoming a true master of delegation. Welcome to another insightful episode of the Master Delegator podcast, your go-to resource for mastering the art of delegation. I'm your host, kristi Yoder, and today we have a fantastic episode lined up for you, focusing on a topic crucial for every business improving cash flow in indispensable role of virtual assistants. But before we dive into the meat of today's discussion, let me introduce our incredible guest, alex. Now, alex is not your stereotypical finance and accounting nerd. With an entrepreneurial mindset, he has the rare ability to both envision the big picture and dive into the nitty-gritty details of a problem. His ability to pull you in with a smile and a joke pairs well with his talent at simplifying a problem to make you feel comfortable, overcoming any obstacle. From a young age, alex was instilled with the belief that business ownership and real estate were the keys to building wealth. Fueling his passion, he invested time and energy in gaining wisdom across a diverse range of business topics and ventures. This journey led him to establish Little CFO Services, a venture aimed at helping business owners truly understand their numbers, empowering them to make informed and strategic decisions. Today, alex is here to share his insights on how to enhance your cash flow and leverage virtual assistants to streamline your operations. So grab your notepads and get ready to learn. Welcome, alex.

Speaker 1:

I thank you, Kristi. I'm happy to be here.

Speaker 2:

You know what, as I was reading your introduction, I was actually thinking of adding some more, because I have personally worked with you and I can definitely tell that working with you has been very so easy and whenever there's difficulties in the business, you make it so light because of how you are as a person and your personality. In my introduction I mentioned that you joke around and that's who you are really. Your introduction is not just something that I said because you said it to me, but because it's really who you are. I believe in it, so it's really you. So I know that I have introduced you already, but tell us a little bit about yourself that I have not mentioned in the introduction, like maybe on the personal side.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I mean to put simply, like my firm and myself, we just help people that make money but feel broke, which is a lot of business owners. We help them just better understand what they make, spend and keep. And on a personal note, like you said, I'm not your stereotypical accountant and finance person. I'm very lighthearted and I try not to bore people to sleep. You know, with all the financial talk there's a lot of people that just not their forte or you know, most people didn't get business to do the accounting and back office or like look at the numbers they got in business to, you know, do whatever they're passionate about. So I'm just there to try and make that side of the business a little bit smoother and help them understand it more.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so what is something that you have seen common in many businesses when it comes to cash flow? I know you mentioned that. You know you help businesses who make money but they feel broke. You know they have a lot of revenue but they don't make profit. Is that one of the common things that you see from businesses?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean part of it is just not doing any type of cash flow forecasting. You know most business owners, what they do is they look at how much is in the bank right now and then they do, like, you know, back in the napkin math of like, okay, well, I have payroll for this amount in like two weeks and then there's this one expense coming up in the week and that's about as far ahead in the future. The day cash flow. They only look, you know, multiple weeks or months out. And another thing is that too many people they focus on revenue and not cash. So like they will have tons of revenue and be like oh, I'm making so much money, but like then they look at the bank account and like where is it? It's because they actually never went and collected it. Like just because you send an invoice doesn't mean that you got paid. You know, and I think if there's a huge disconnect on that One of my brand new clients he had like invoices from 2021 still outstanding but he's never reflected on. He didn't know about it because he never looked. And I think that's a pretty common problem that most business owners have.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I love that, and that's actually one of the things that you help us outright when we started working together. You help us, see, you know, you help us forecast our cash flow, because I was one of those business owners as well. You know, like, all right, we have $50,000 in our bank account, you know, and our payroll is this much. That means we can still survive for the next two weeks, you know, but after that I don't know what to do. Who knows? Yeah, so I believe that it's really important to have your cash flow forecasting, and not many business owners know how to do that Right and even just simply running the business. You know the operation side of it. Not all businesses know. Not all business owners know how to operate their business how much more if we talk about finances, except maybe for those businesses who studied. You know, finance financing back in college. But one of the reasons why I chose the topic that we're going to talk about today, which is, you know, enhancing a business's cash flow, is because last year I felt that it was tough, you know, for other businesses, or for many businesses, including mine, to sustain their cash flow. So today I want to teach our listeners how they can improve their cash flow, and, at the same time, I want to learn from you as well. So let's just, you know, dive right in. So how can a business improve its cash flow?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and when you ask most business owners like, what's your biggest problem, most business owners will say you know sales and marketing. But when you really talk to them for a few more minutes, what's keeping them up at night is their financials and like, if they're going to be in business in a month from now, you know because they are going to allow money or something like that. The biggest things that you know that successful businesses, own business owners and businesses have that you know, going into a recession or just even in general, is just having a low accounts receivable. So, like I said, not focusing just on revenue but receiving that revenue, actually getting the cash, having some type of system set up to where, when you send the invoice to a customer, there's automatic reminders of like, hey, when this is due, like you know, three or seven days before the due date and then on the due date, and have some type of system set up to where you follow up to make sure that back it's collected on. One of my newest strategic partners is a payment processing service and I love what they're doing and they have it set up to where anything under a certain dollar threshold you can auto debit the customer's account, which I haven't really found anywhere. You know it's most auto debiting type of thing is a recurring payment and it's a set amount every month. But what if it's, you know, variable and in their case it's like a pool maintenance. So where it's, you know it's a set month, a set amount every month. But sometimes there's repairs or something and in the contract it has you know how much basically they can auto debit for. But that eliminates the need to even send an invoice. The customer doesn't have to actually even look at it and then get around to paying it at some point. So having some type of system to where you're sending the invoices, hopefully automatically, and then also collecting on them and you know, reminding them, let the customer know if you're not, you know auto debiting that it's due and not just sending it. And oh yeah, you know the customer is definitely going to pay on the due date. Because that's, you know that's wishful thinking. That's not really how the real world works. Having a system for the receiving the money, having a low concentration risk for customers and vendors, which is super hard to do when you're starting out, you know you might have a handful of customers that are, you know, most of your revenue. But if one of those customers goes away, you know that's can really hurt you, that can put you out of business. So having as much as you can not a concentration of all your revenue or all your suppliers being one person, having a backup you know vendor, if you have a certain suppliers like that, having someone else that you could go to in an emergency type of thing. The third one I have here is just being prepared with an emergency fund. You know it's something everyone talks about. You know, save up, have an emergency fund. But most people don't actually do that in practice. They have the mentality of like, oh well, if I just put more money into operations and investing and doing my business better, then later on I'll have time to put money aside when everything's going great. But that's usually not how life goes. There's usually going to be a rough patch, no matter what you're doing. So just having a little bit away every month, you know, to make that emergency fund, which is usually three to six months of operating expenses, is what we like to see. Three months is like realistic. Six months would be amazing, but usually not what people can build up to unless they're doing really well and then simply having strong fundamentals with you know, have you really looked at what everything costs in your business? Is your pricing appropriate to where the cost that it takes you to actually produce the product or provide the service to the client is a good gross profit margin, to where you're actually making good money? Because, you know, one of my specialties is contractors and, like the construction environment and a lot of contractors don't think about all the extra expenses it takes to provide the product or service. So they'll give an estimate for a project, a construction project or whatnot, but they won't think about all the overhead and like indirect costs that it takes to do that project. Now, at the end of the day, you know, like their estimate was like, oh, I was going to 30%, profit on this project is going to be great. And then if they happen to actually review the project after it's completed, it's like, oh, our profit margin was like 12%. You know what happened there and it's because of all the other costs that like, oh, yeah, we always have that cost. Like they didn't think about it. Just, you know, really honing in on provide, like doing a good estimate, but in order to do a good estimate, just reviewing what does it actually take to provide the service? But those are kind of my main five things. I think they're great fundamentals of the successful business, and there could be a billion different things.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I know, yeah, those are really good. I love about. I love that you mentioned about you know, having emergency funds. Hey, are you sick and tired of being overwhelmed because you are doing everything alone in your business and can't scale because you don't have a team supporting you? Well, you don't have to worry anymore, because smart VAs can provide you with a team of experience virtual assistance that can do different tasks to support your growth from admin to bookkeeping to social media, video and podcast editing to website graphics, seo and customer service. Smart VA's team can help you grow your business without any worries or stress from all the tasks weighing down on you. If you are a business entrepreneur who needs help with your day to day tasks so you can focus on growing your business, then you have to visit smart virtual assistantscom. So when should a business start saving up for emergency funds? Does it have to be like, let's say, after two months of being in the business or after a year of being in the business? Like how soon should the business start having an emergency funds?

Speaker 1:

I mean realistically, it should be like immediately. I mean most people would suggest that if you have like a full-time job and you're starting this business as a side business and you're wanting to make the switch from a full-time job into this business being your full-time gig, having like a six-month runway of expenses, most people can't really do that. It's really a gamble to know with their business. I think it's just. It's all about just starting because it's a habit thing. It's not really about how much you put into your fund, it's more about getting into the habit of doing it in the first place. Just putting away a small percentage of your revenue every month and just having that mentality of that is something you can't touch because it's locked away for either. For taxes, same thing with the tax idea of putting in a different bucket for taxes versus savings. Just starting somewhere and then having that as a goal for your year to have three months worth and that savings and working towards that is really just. It's more about the mindset versus X amount percentage every month.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's the consistency. I love that. And so let's say there's a business owner and this business owner has a lot of, let's say, has a revenue of $100,000 every month, but the profit, the net profit, is negative 10%, almost consistent for the past six months. Like, what would you advise a business owner to take a look at and what type of changes should the business owner do?

Speaker 1:

Right now, like my guess would be, pricing needs to change. A lot of people haven't changed their prices in years. Second thing would be to look at subscriptions and like where are your, where's your money actually going towards? As part of that whole pricing thing, you take a look at the actual, you know, cost of goods, service cost of goods sold or cost of services, but actually cost to provide the service or product, seeing at like, okay, is there any way to make this more efficient or cut down the cost it takes to provide that service? A lot of times people have tons of subscriptions that they're paying for, they're not actually using anymore or they don't really need. I mean, when you're having a loss, like it's basically just you're looking at what do I absolutely need at that point? And even if it's nice to have, like, you have to weigh that against. Do I want to eat or is this subscription? Is this, you know, tech service that's part of my tech stack? Is that really needed for me to operate my business? And you'll find a lot of things that you can cut if you have to. But another thing like one of the first things I look at when I look at a business is usually cracker fees because that's usually what people. They just accept that that's a cost-doing business and once they found one provider they never review to see if that's the best provider in the future or if there's a better way to do it, like that new payment process that I mentioned. They actually emailed me. That was cold email. It was one of the billion cold emails that I get. But actually it was a diamond in the rough and it's been, you know, fame-changing for a lot of my clients. But just looking at that it can make a night and day type of thing. Like one of the first clients that switched over to them. It's got to save them $27,000 next year just by switching over to payment process. Nothing really changed on this side of the house. You know, all you did was change payment processors and how the system's run, but everything's automated didn't change how he operates his business, but significantly different to his bottom line.

Speaker 2:

Wow, yeah, actually, credit card fees are one of the things that we tried to resolve too right, and I know you have provided some solutions to us, and this is just the reality of owning a business, right, like? We have so many things that we have to take a look at, you know, and we have to make sure that we're not just focused on the operations side of the business, like sales marketing, you know, hiring people but also keep focused on your finances. I think for many businesses, or many business owners, as long as they pay themselves on a monthly basis and even if their net profit is in the negative, they don't care as much. And I feel like what I have learned as well recently is that, even though I pay myself, it's not okay that my net profit is in the negative because I have to reinvest back to the business unless I'm willing to reinvest my payroll back. You know my own pay back to the business, so what can you say about that?

Speaker 1:

I mean if your net profit is negative, eventually that's going to catch up to you because, like, if you're doing the accounting properly and like you're not, if you're paying yourself and it's a distribution not actually like your on payroll or anything, then like it doesn't go through the income statement so you don't see it. So actually like your net profits actually less, even more loss than it might look like. But it's all about just cutting expenses and looking at is my pricing, is that fair market value? And then kind of doing a scenario plan which is where I step in of, like you know, if our price is X, like what does that mean? How much of our customers do we think we'll lose if we increase our prices for X amount? And can we survive, you know, based on that, or if we keep that with the prices now, how long can we survive? For? I mean, everyone knows like you can't run a loss for very long and then you know, expect to stay in business still unless there are, you know, not really real losses. But that's a whole accounting thing. It really just comes down to you're paying more than your business can afford. It's like most Americans have a problem of they're living above their means, and that's basically what your business means. They either means that you're spending too much money on stuff that you shouldn't be, or you can't afford and support, or you need to be making more money, and the easiest way to make more money is to raise your prices, and you can't always do that, but most business owners they're so scared of raising their prices, but that's really what needs to happen and it's acceptable. You know it's your prices went up, so your prices for your customers have to go up. That's just how economics works.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, and even with my business I raised my pricing last year and even with my current clients I had to raise their you know your their payment a little bit, you know, just to be able to raise my members pay as well, you know, because of inflation. You know, like we can't, we can't continue. We can't continue for paying a lot more for our costs of goods if we're not setting our pricing right you know. And so, speaking of cost of goods, you know one of there are. There are so many business owners coming to us, you know, because they want to hire. They want to have a more cost-effective solution for further business. You know, instead of hiring somebody for $50 an hour, they can hire somebody for a lot cheaper than that. So let's talk about outsourcing. What do you think is the benefits of that when it comes to improving a business's cash flow?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I know the sounds, you know biased and self-serving, but it, like the virtual assistance, is in like the same realm as like fractional just like myself where, like you know, a fractional CFO is a chief financial officer that helps on the financial strategy of the business. But I work with people with businesses that are, you know, in the $500,000 annual revenue to you know, $50 million in revenue stage to where they've grown enough, to where they have those larger problems that they need that high level support on but they're not making enough money to, you know, support a full-time, $300,000 chief financial officer. But a fractional CFO can come in and provide that experience and knowledge at a fraction of the time but also a fraction of the cost. It's the same thing for a fractional CMO, you know, chief marketing officer or chief operating officer or a virtual assistant. You get them for a fraction of the time but you still get the knowledge like it doesn't just because they're only on, you're not like a full member of your team. All they're all the time, like they're, their knowledge stays the same. You still get 100% of their knowledge and their experience. And it's the same idea, just utilizing where you have gaps and you can't fully support a full team member, you know, because a lot of people they can't just take a part-time job. We need a full-time job to support themselves. But when you have DAs or fractional people that are working on multiple businesses at the same time, you get to use their wealth of experience and knowledge, not only from just you know, their past prior experience, but also what they're seeing with other clients and what as working for other clients or what isn't working for other clients. They can share that with you and it's it's super helpful Because I think a lot of business owners they neglect the whole like opportunity cost of things of like oh well, if I do it myself, I can save you know $2,000 this month. It's like, okay, well, like one of my newest clients that he was talking about, how you know he's doing all the back office stuff and my firm was basically coming in to pick over all the accounting and finance support and he could save you know a few thousand dollars to do it all himself, or he could hand it off to us and with that time could go get another million dollars in revenue over the next four months and it's like, well, if you put it that way, it's like a no-brainer. You know and it's the same thing with you know virtual assistants. You could be doing all the marketing and all the admin work and all the stuff yourself. But think of, if you actually use your time properly, how much more revenue and how much more could you build your business if you had that time to work on building your business and not doing all the admin work. Yeah, it's gonna cost you some more money coming out of your bank account, but if you're actually doing utilizing your time properly, think of how much more money you could be bringing in. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's really an investment, you know, as long as you use your free time wisely. Hey, are you looking for a community to learn how you can be effective in delegation so you can focus on the things that matter the most in your business and grow to six to seven figures? If this is you, then today is your lucky day. Join our Facebook group today to get your questions answered on delegation, outsourcing, business growth, hiring members and many more. We offer so much value in the group, so join our growing community by going to facebookcom. Slash groups slash master delegator See you there. When it comes to business owners who don't have any idea how to handle their finances, do you think they should learn how to handle their finances? Do you think they should learn how to cash flow forecast or project their cash flow, or do you feel like they should just hire somebody else to take care of it for them?

Speaker 1:

It's a mix of both, because even with my professional CFO work, the goal isn't just to always be there to answer a question for someone. It's not to give them the answers. It's to help train them to think the same way that I do, so they can answer a lot of the questions themselves Not just replace me, but so I can be there to help guide them in having a new perspective and to provide those second opinions on things. For instance, I think cash flow forecasting once someone is taught how it's done, it's a super simple exercise. But just having a tool to be able to do it like a template and then having the expertise coming in and being taught oh, this is where you do this, this is where you do this. Having that knowledge, that's all they really need when they're just starting out in those early days. You need to have a grasp of the financials and basically what I teach a lot of clients, or all my clients, is basically how every business decision that they make affects the critical for revenue, gross profit, net profit and cash. Those are the four most important numbers in your business and every business decision you make affects one of those four numbers and that's just how the mentality is you don't need to outsource everything, especially at the beginning, and you need to have an understanding of how all your decisions affect all those things. You can't just be like oh I hired a fractional CFO and outsourced a counting firm, I don't have to learn any of that stuff. You still know how it works so you can judge if they're doing a good job or not. You still have to understand how what you're doing affects your business, but it's kind of like a no-ground basically.

Speaker 2:

Right, yeah, I love that. When is the best time to hire a CFO?

Speaker 1:

Usually around the $500,000 to a million dollar annual revenue mark is where it makes sense. Obviously it'd be great to deal with beforehand but it just doesn't make sense usually until around then. Outsourced accounting you win a bookkeeper as soon as possible. It usually makes most sense when you're around 125, maybe 150k annual revenue. That's when your business can support outsourcing those type of things. Each industry is a little bit different. Some industries they can wait longer before they really start to need a fractional CFO just because their industry has higher revenue numbers but the same business problems as a lower revenue industry does. For instance, in the structural world their revenue numbers are way higher because it's like a $1 million house or whatever.

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker 1:

But the profit and the day may be the same as a $500,000 business. Numbers are a little bit different. One more zero, basically, but similar problems. It really depends on the industry, but $500,000 to $1 million annual revenue for a fractional CFO type of world and $125,000 to $150,000 annual revenue for accounting, outsourced accounting.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and probably even before your business is hurting for money, right?

Speaker 1:

Because it's kind of hard. It's really about preempting the problems. Do you want to grow? A fractional CFO or outsourced accounting firm Isn't supposed to be like a bandaid. It's supposed to prevent the hurt in the first place. I mean, we can help you, obviously, when it starts hurting, but we want to make sure you don't hurt in the first place. It's preventive care instead of reactive care.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly I love that. And what advice can you give to those businesses who are hurting financially right now, those who want to improve their cash flow this year?

Speaker 1:

I'll try and boil it down to a couple of different points. One review your outstanding accounts receivable. Who owes you money? And go talk to them. Don't be a douche about it, but just ask them hey, this was due back then. When should we expect payment? It's be professional and nice about it. Do all your expenses, do an in-depth of every single expense that's come out of your bank account last month. See which wins are necessary, which wins aren't. Look into a line of credit or business credit cards Having those fallbacks. An emergency fund is great, but a secondary type of emergency fund is a credit card, a line of credit when things get rough. And then look at raising your prices, seeing what expenses you can cut other than just the subscriptions you don't use anymore, and just really doing a review of like. Is there a better way for me to do my business? Or is there things that I could pay for, like a virtual assistant, that could free up a little bit of time for me to go do things that are more profitable for my business, Because it sucks. It seems counterintuitive to spend money when you're hurting already, but if you utilize it wisely and you know that you can gain more revenue off of having that free time. It's definitely worth it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's sort of like a calculated risk.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Like you're risk hiring somebody in hopes to get more revenues because it will give you more time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, just like hiring a marketing firm just like yesterday or the day before I just hired a new marketing firm and I don't know exactly how long I get back from that but you're paying out money up front in the hopes that the experience and the knowledge and what they're doing is going to gain you more revenue. It's an investment. It's literally the definition of investment and that's what investing in any outside work is. You have to think of virtual assistants or professional CFOs or just every contractor in the same realm of, like a marketing type of deal. Right, yeah, it costs X amount, but what is it freeing me up to do and was it going to get me?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's so true. And as we wrap up, my last question for you is if I'm a business owner that's ready to hire a CFO, what should I prepare?

Speaker 1:

Well, the number one thing usually is you have to have your financials in order. It's hard for me to do any type of advice If you and I both don't have any idea where you're at financially. If you're like, yeah, well, I think I made money last month, I can't really do a lot of advice on that. Luckily, like I have two sides of my business, I have the fractional CFO side and then I have the accounting and tax side, so I can basically refer those people over to that side of my business to help them get their financials cleaned up, especially now. Right now is tax time. This is when people are like okay, I need to find my taxes. Oh wait, I haven't done my bookkeeping at all for last year. And this is when everyone last minute tries to paint on the bottom and then tries to get ready for tax time. So it's really just getting their books ready and just having a conversation. You never know what they can do for you and there's a lot of things that you can learn on the call. I provide one hour free strategy sessions for people. We don't have to go super in depth. If you don't feel comfortable sharing your financials or anything, we can just hop on a call. You can tell me about the things that are going on in your business. I can just give you ideas and where you can look into or solutions that can help you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, awesome. And where can people find you online?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I am wwwlilcfo-servicescom.

Speaker 2:

That's awesome. Well, it's a pleasure having you on the show, alex. I learned a lot. I mean, I know most of the things that you discussed here. You mentioned this to me during my consultation with you and when we were working together, but it's just a good group pressure to kind of hear all of these things again. I think my key takeaway from this episode is to start saving up for an emergency fund, because we're not doing that right now. We just let our money sit in just one bank account. But we project and we're forecast. But yeah, thank you so much for everything that you've shared.

Speaker 1:

Of course, yeah, I'm always here to help.

Speaker 2:

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode. If you like this episode, please share this with your entrepreneur or business owner friends on social media, so they can have freedom and flexibility while running a successful business as well. Please also subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your feedback will inspire me to continue creating content like this and help me improve this podcast show for you. Thank you so much again for listening and I'll see you again on the next episode.

Improving Cash Flow With Virtual Assistants
Improving Cash Flow for Businesses
(Cont.) Improving Cash Flow for Businesses
Essential Fundamentals for Business Success
Improving Business Profitability and Cash Flow
(Cont.) Improving Business Profitability and Cash Flow
Financial Success in Business
Key Takeaway