Welcome to Amanda’s semi-regular blog, where she writes about how to improve business profitability
Spreadsheets are not a panacea
My husband thinks that Excel can be used for anything, from planning a project to producing a technical drawing – yes really!
Is SpreadsheetAccuracyTheory a thing?
My family jokes that my ideal Xmas present is a spreadsheet containing errors that I have to find.
The grass isn’t always greener
When you’re stuck in the 9-5 grind of a day job, particularly one where your time is charged by the hour, it can seem very appealing to jack it in and become self-employed. That feeling that you could be working for yourself is alluring – you could charge less, and still be better off.
I wonder how many people in this situation have read The eMyth Revisited by Michael E Gerber? If they have, they might be more cautious about taking the plunge to self-employment or a freelance lifestyle.
Stuck prices requires a leap
Many years ago, I ran a software development house. I and a team of 4 other developers wrote and supported bespoke software for a range of clients. We were writing what would now be called an ERP system, without the finance bit.
Around the time my second son was born, over 12 years ago, the company finances were in dire straits.
What’s your pricing strategy?
Peter Cook, CEO of Thought Leaders Business School say that “we are all dysfunctional about money.” I think this is worth bearing in mind when it comes to working out pricing.
Managing Cashflow Requires Purposeful Pacesetting
Companies with a traumatic productivity culture must focus on cash flow. Rather like a marathon runner has a pacesetter to do a put in a good time, when trauma strikes, a business needs its own pacesetter to measure the pace of cash flow collection, because without cash, as we all know, a business will fail.
The impact of price
An often overlooked lever in productivity is price. The measure of productivity is a value (£), so price plays an important part. Productivity is not the same as efficiency.