by Ian Smith | Feb 9, 2014 | Basic Finance, Leadership, Operational Blueprints
I was recommended a great book to read by my friend Loren Carlson (Chairman of the Boston based CEO Roundtable) – The Outsiders by William N. Thorndike, Jr. subtitled, Eight Unconvential CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success. So you thought...
by Ian Smith | Dec 1, 2013 | Basic Finance, Fund Raising
There was a fascinating article in the FT last week concerning Intuit and others using big data to smooth bank lending to small business. The key developments were: 7 Interesting Developments QuickBooks (owned by Intuit) have developed a platform called Quickbooks...
by Ian Smith | Oct 20, 2013 | Basic Finance, Scaling
Raising venture capital immediately transforms your balance sheet into a platform for scaling. Of course failure is still a high probability. Especially if you execute the wrong things. But that immediate injection of capital allows management to roll out their...
by Ian Smith | Sep 23, 2012 | Basic Finance
It seems simple enough but seldom done. The ingredients of a robust set of monthly cash targets for your credit control team: Ensure all customers are clear on your terms of trade. Ensure you have a query/problem resolution system in place to resolve billing problems...
by Ian Smith | Sep 14, 2012 | Basic Finance
There’s always knowledge to be learned from a book and then there is the important stuff to be gleaned from running a business. A Balance Sheet is a snapshot in time, like a photograph. It is not a video. It cannot show motion. It can only show a static picture....
by Ian Smith | Aug 19, 2012 | Basic Finance
It doesn’t seem much at the time. Your Accounts Receivables Days outstanding has just slipped from 45 days on average to 50 days. So what? You lose 5 days. Say you ship $36.5m of product in a year. Call it $100,000 per day of sales invoices (for the lawyers...
