The Small Business Survivor
Your benefits
Running a small business is on the job training with an edge! We need to plug the gaps in our business acumen, earn an income and build our business at the same time. Each one of us begins with some, but not all of the skills it takes to turn a great idea into a great business. Our newsletter, The Small Business Survivor, gives you the basics of business finance and operations in bite-sized pieces. We look forward to the day when you can improve your business using the basics our newsletter provides. And we look forward to your success stories!
- We publish twice a month.
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- You can subscribe here or by signing up during one of our seminars.
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Sign up for The Small Business Survivor for useful tips and insights that build your understanding of the basics and turn them into useful tools to improve your business.
Current and Future Topics
This year begins with financial topics and suggests ways for you to use money as a tool to improve your business. You will learn to connect your financials to reality with step-by-step common sense insight to financial terms. This series began in December but you can catch up with The Biz Income Statement, our free download.
Some say the business failure rate is 9 in 10; some say it is 3 in 4. What’s going on? Look behind the numbers. What brings success, longevity and growth? Two factors are absolutely essential for all types of businesses.
- See Business Failures: Facts & Myths one of our newsletters. What is a failure and what is a closure? Where do these numbers come from?
- Read the Fewer Business Failures newsletter for the two success factors. Are they working for you or against you?
Learn how to read between the lines of a profit and loss statement with two newsletters.
- Money to Run Your Biz looks at various sources of income and how businesses use them. Are some income sources more important than others? What are the real sources of your income? Are you sure?
- There's all sorts of ways to measure expenses and profits. Biz Expenses & Profits describes several ways to classify expenses and measure profits (with their name tags). When are taxes an expense? Where do loan payments fit in? And, last but not least, do all companies pay the owners in the same manner?
What about other peoples money?
- Biz Loans looks at the risks and rewards of getting a loan and using it to build your business. Where does a loan appear on your financials? Do we treat the principle different than interest?
- Building a Relationship with your Banker tells you what to expect from a banker and how to prepare for their questions.
- Biz Investors looks at ownership and what it means. What about your cousin Smedly? Do investors leave you alone or help run your company? Who gets the profits and when? Hint: don't give away your company on a cocktail napkin.
Balance sheets look at the financial health of your business. Are they Greek to you? What does business health mean? Many answers are in two places, the single numbers and the ratios. What can the single numbers tell you? There's sales, your checking account, your expenses and so forth. Three financial reports contain these numbers: the balance sheet, the profit & loss (or income statement) and the statement of cash flows.
- You own your Biz assets. We separate them into two categories: short term and long term. Where's today's cash? Where's tomorrow's cash? Where does the cash come from?
- Your bills are near-term debt and loans & mortgages are long term debt. Biz Liabilities helps you classify the money you owe. We compare the balance sheet to your profit & loss statement to show you how to find your bills on each one.
- Two of the financials focus on the long term, the balance sheet and statement of cash flows. The Biz Flow series looks at the sources and uses of cash during an accounting period. These issues view cash as a revolving door for business transactions.
Sometimes there's information in a single number. Other types of information require a context. Owners often ask, "Do I have enough cash?" Enough compared to what? This question has a context and that context is in some other number from the financial statements. The context is the money you have and the money you owe.
- Do you have enough cash? Biz Liquidity looks at ratios to answer that question. There are different rations because that question can have different meanings. How do you know if you have enough cash? What is the relationship between sales and liquidity?
- Your financials include information that measures of your activity levels. What important lesson does the automotive industry give to manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers? Biz Activity and More Biz Activity show you how to measure customer and vendor payments and how quickly products move through your business.
- Biz Leverage and Biz Performance complete our series on ratios. They address debt payments and profit measures.