Archive for the ‘Finance’ Category
Is Your Company Growing Too Fast?
September 9th, 2012 | 
Author: 
When business picks up particularly after challenging periods like our recent recession, it’s easy to overlook basic financials. It’s even easier to overlook less obvious financials like the Sustainable Growth Rate. The SGR calculates the rate of growth your business is able to sustain without additional borrowing. It essentially answers the question, “How fast can I afford to grow in my current state?” A simple look in the App Store will reveal an SGR calculator for less than a dollar. Check out the interesting discussion at the Harvard Business Review Blog here.
Find the Sustainable Growth Rate Calculator here for 99 cents.
Posted in 
Where are You Making Investments?
Where Are You Making Investments Right Now?
During the midst of the recession, most Vistage members were quite conservative in their spending and rightly so. They were advised by certain Vistage speakers to use the hard times as an opportunity to take business from their competitors and make investments in marketing, advertising and superior sales staff.
In my experience, even those members that did invest in taking market share from competitors were extremely cautious about any expenditure that increased overhead or that otherwise was not directly billable to customers. In many cases that meant that the owner or CEO dropped back from being solely an executive to being part of the senior sales or management team. Unfortunately that often meant that the ship was moving ahead with a weak hand on the tiller. On the upside, that fiscal conservatism also meant that while sales were slumping, margins remained steady or, in some cases actually climbed.
Although opinion is mixed on the strength and durability of the current recovery, few argue that we are indeed seeing a recovery. Many of my members are seeing some of their highest sales and profit months in years and some are now making a leap of faith and adding to their office, operations or management staff and trying to wrestle time to once again fulfill the true CEO role.
Do you have enough faith in the recovery, and is business returning to levels where you are once again willing to add overhead staff?
What Your Employees Don’t Know Will Hurt You
In discussions with Tucson Vistage CEO’s the discussion often turns to the question of how much company financial information to share with employees. The answer differs between companies, and even within divisions of each company. This article in today’s Wall Street Journal offers an excellent discussion of the topic.