Getting to the Bottom Line: Conversations to help business owners maximize revenue, profit, and cash flow
Whether you're looking to boost your profits or simply gain a clearer understanding what drives business success, "Getting to the Bottom Line" is your ultimate guide to unlocking the strategies and secrets behind sustainable growth and the financial freedom you deserve. Tune in and discover how to turn your business goals into tangible results, one insightful conversation at a time.
Getting to the Bottom Line: Conversations to help business owners maximize revenue, profit, and cash flow
Financial Clarity for Entrepreneurs with New Light Solutions
What if you could revolutionize your business's financial approach with just one episode? Join us for a transformative conversation as Stephanie Smith and her husband Kris Smith, co-owners of New Light Financial Solutions, uncover the secrets of financial empowerment for entrepreneurs. We share our personal journey of expanding our business into a larger space to better serve you and discuss the critical role an outsourced CFO can play in businesses of all sizes, not just the giants like Coca-Cola. Together, we aim to dismantle the anxiety and confusion that financial matters often bring to business owners, providing the clarity and strategies you need to thrive.
In this episode of Getting to the Bottom Line, we promise you'll learn how to navigate your financials with the confidence of a seasoned CFO. Discover how we analyze past financials, forecast future trends, and pinpoint your business's strengths and weaknesses to drive success. Whether you're a small business owner wearing multiple hats or a corporate leader seeking strategic insights, our conversation is tailored to equip you with the knowledge to make informed decisions. Don't let financial uncertainty hold you back—tune in and take control of your business's financial destiny.
We want to hear from you! Send us a message.
---
My name is Stephanie Smith, owner of New Light Financial Solutions, and we help business owners walk the one clear path to generating more cash in their business. To learn more, visit us online at https://newlightfs.com/
Sign up for our newsletter for more great tips on how to keep the cash flowing in your business: https://newlightfs.com/newsletter/
Need help generating more cash in your business? Book a right fit call with us today: https://newlightfs.com/rightfit
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Getting to the Bottom Line, where I'm your host, stephanie Smith, co-owner of New Light Financial Solutions, and I have a special guest with me today. I have brought my husband, chris Smith, who is the other owner of New Light Financial Solutions. We actually run the business together, so thanks so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, I'm glad to be here, yeah.
Speaker 1:I thought it would be good to hear from both of us. I've had a lot of guests on the show, but I want to do some episodes where it's us talking about what we do, how we help people and the things that we look at that impact the bottom line as well, to get both sides of the story. But if you didn't notice, we have been a little absent on the podcast, for it ended up, I think, being almost two months and that's because we just moved Bad timing, I guess, to start a podcast right before that. But we needed to get a little bit of a bigger place and I needed my own office, which we are in and I'm super excited about. So we are all settled in and we are ready for the long haul at this point. Next chapter of our lives. That's right, it's been good.
Speaker 2:We've really enjoyed it so far, yeah it's been nice.
Speaker 1:So why we're here? I really want to talk to you about our mission as a business. Here at New Light Financial Solutions, we really have like a twofold mission. First of all, we want to really simplify business finances for people, demystify it, so to speak, and it's really just something that's complicated, that I think some people feel a lot of shame and guilt around and it's confusing and it's really just something that's complicated, that I think some people feel a lot of shame and guilt around and it's confusing and it's not taught when you start a business.
Speaker 2:You just start a business and don't realize you have to know everything, and finances tends to be one of those places where I feel like people don't focus on Right, yeah, no, I mean, the real reason as to why we do what we do is because of how we do what we do, and how we do this is by offering CFO services. But the real question with that is what is a CFO? So what? How would you define a CFO? What is that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we've. We've talked to friends of ours and said, oh we're, we have our outsourced CFO services and glazed eyes you know, sometimes it's like what is that exactly?
Speaker 1:Or people think really big corporations right, cfo is chief financial officer and you think Coca-Cola or these really big companies. And while that's true, many of those companies do hire CFOs and they're usually full-time employees. In general, cfos do the same thing, regardless of where you're at they take a look at the financials, they're reviewing what's happened in the past, figure out what they think is going to happen in the future, and they see what's working and what's not working. We want to know where our areas of weaknesses are and our strengths are, and then we want to propose corrective action. So, regardless of what the cf, who the cfo works for, they're doing these three things.
Speaker 1:So we do that as well, and it doesn't matter what size company it is. Every company needs someone in this type of role to help guide them in the right direction, because financials are really important. When you're running a business Right and I know, like you've ever watched Shark Tank, which we watch a lot there's always like know your numbers Right. So, and you don't have to be in the nitty gritty of everything, but you do have to be familiar, and that's why we want to help people better understand their financials.
Speaker 2:Well, it's hard as the business owner You're doing so much for your business and you're wearing so many different hats it's really hard to go back to the financials and really understand how they are and how they apply to your business and take that information and really make the correct business decisions for your business. But that's really where we come into play. You know, we take the financials and we evaluate the financials and we come up with a plan of action on how to, where or where you should focus in your business next. And we do that by coming up with what we call the one clear path. So what? How would you describe what our one clear path is for people?
Speaker 1:So the one clear path is a six step process that we walk people through, but it basically covers the three things I talked about earlier. We will first, before we get into anything, start with goals, because it's like driving your car. Setting your goals is like driving your car Okay, like if you get in your car, you just drive around. How will you ever know where you're going for one, or know if you've got to where you're supposed to be going? So we start with business and personal goals, because most people that start a business start it for a reason. It's not always to make millions of dollars for the business itself. They wanna do stuff for themselves as well. So we focus on goals to begin with, because then that gives us a target for where we want to end up and we wanna be.
Speaker 1:So we start with goals, but then us on the backend, we look at your financials, we look at what's happened in the past and we forecast what's going to happen in the future.
Speaker 1:And you don't have to worry about any of that. Our clients they're not the ones in the numbers digging into them unless they really want to be, but we're the ones looking to see what's working and what's not working. And what's really cool that we have and we do with our clients is we have this scoreboard. The scoreboard is really simple. It's a red, yellow, green scoreboard to show what's working and what's not working, and we actually pick probably the top two to three things to focus on. So it's not if your business is doing poorly, it's not all red right. We want to just focus on certain things and focus on the things that will make the most impact. But we simplify it by having that scorecard so you can see exactly what we're going to focus on, exactly what's going to make the biggest impact, and it's not just your profit and loss statement, because I know if you've looked at one of those, it can be confusing.
Speaker 2:It's a whole different language it really is. Your profit and loss is written in the accounting language and not everybody is familiar with what the accounting terms are on your P&L or balance sheet, or even how to read those numbers and then how to apply them to your business. It's crazy how difficult it is and everybody's business is different, so you can't really compare it to somebody else's business because their P&L and balance sheet is going to be different than yours. So that's what we do. That's how we really help identify what these specific areas to concentrate on are and with this scoreboard, we give you a very simple way to see where the directly impactable or I'm not saying they're impactable or problems areas are in your business and how they can really make big changes in your business. And then we come up with clear steps on how, on what to do next, where to go next in the next month or the next two months or however much time we put in there and and we really make the difference in in, or the most impact to your business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so what we do after we create a scoreboard is we work with our clients to make an action plan and with that action plan we set the objectives, but based on the things that we know will make the biggest impact.
Speaker 1:But, then we work with the business owner to say, ok, well, how can we accomplish these goals? Right, because you have to take action to see results in whatever you're doing, it doesn't matter if it's business or if it's in for your personal life. And then we are the accountability partner, and that's one of the biggest pieces to the puzzle that we have is we help business owners stay on track. And that's really important because I know, if you're anything like me, I can easily go down rabbit holes of doing things I shouldn't be doing or not focusing on, or someone could just come along the way and be like, hey, where are you on? These things that we talked about will make a big impact. That makes a big difference. So we become that accountability partner for our clients.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or if you have new ideas for your company, you want to see how they would work in your business, can you do that idea in your business? It's really great to have that other person that you can bounce your ideas off of and you can say, hey, I'm thinking about doing this, I'm thinking about implementing this. Can I hire this person? You know, am I paying myself enough? All these questions that a business owner has? You don't not. Everybody has somebody that they can really talk to about this and really open up with ideas and stuff.
Speaker 2:And we want to do that with people, with our clients. We want to talk to them and understand your business and make the business the most it can be for you, the business owner, because that's why you got into the business you know, to really have something that's yours and have it work and be profitable. Because they say what it's like 80% of businesses or something like that, go out of business within the first three years or something like that. It's like so many of them just just a fail right off. The nine out of 10 businesses fail within the first 10 years or something. It's just, it's crazy these numbers of how many businesses are just dropping off the map and failing. So we don't want to see that. We want to help stop that and and see successful businesses.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so back to our original mission being twofold. Part of that was simplifying business finances, but the other part of that is to partner with businesses and help them have a growing and more successful, more profitable business, whatever that looks like to them, because everyone's different. Even talking about benchmarking against other people we were talking about this yesterday it's not like you need to benchmark against someone else. Well, sometimes that's important. It's what is it that you want your business to be and where you want to take your business. That's the success measure. Everyone has an idea of what they want and we want to partner with business owners to get to that point. So back to the goals. Right, it all comes back to what you want your business to accomplish, and that's what we are here to do to partner with them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's really exciting.
Speaker 1:We love doing this for our clients, we love seeing success and seeing growth, and everyone results right Everyone that we work with, whether that looks like, you know we we do also offer bookkeeping services, so it might be cleaning up the books, but we really do enjoy the CFO, outsource, outsource, cfo work and seeing businesses grow and take these steps to advance and make progress in their businesses. We are excited to do this and if it's something that you're interested in or you want to hear more about, we do offer a free right fit call to see if we would be a good fit for you and if this is something that might work for you and your business. So if you're interested in doing that, definitely check us out on our website. It's newlightfscom. You'll see a link right there to book a call. We would love to talk with you. Even if we don't end up working together. We would love to hear from you and hear about your business and what you're doing and see what's going on in your business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this has been fun. Yeah, thanks for coming on the show and chatting with me today.
Speaker 1:That's it for this episode of Getting to the Bottom Line. Look out for more episodes with me and maybe Chris will come back and talk about the things that we look at specifically. We look at 16 financial drivers that impact people's revenue, profit and cash flow, and I want to do some shows that dive into more of those things. So look out for some of those episodes in the future. But thanks everyone for joining us. I hope you have a great day. Great Thanks, bye everyone.
