Early in my career I believed that hard work was the key to success. Most of my first jobs were doing manual labor, and I was often complemented for how hard I worked on a consistent basis. The harder I worked, the faster we got things done, and so I believe that hard work was the key to success. After graduating with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering my first corporate job was testing and developing software that required me to be...more
Let's take a look at a financial perspective of business and examine where the money goes. A favorite saying of one of my mentors is "follow the piles of cash". Although this is not all there is to business, it is definitely something you can never lose sight of as a manager or business leader. Cash flow is in a business goes something like this.Our sales team is tasked with finding new customers, and helping them find the best solutions to their...more
How do you measure success? After years of trial, error, training and research I have a management tip for you: the four top level measurements that I recommend everyone have in place across their business or team. They should be built into everyone's goals and objectives each year. Every department head should have improvements to one of them as a goal each year. They are: 1. Production: what did the business get from this department? Generally this measurement should be in dollars.2. Cost: what did it cost the business to have this department? Generally this measurement should be in dollars.3. Success Rate: how often do they succeed at their top objectives? This can often be measured as a variance to expectations.4. Cost of Failure: what does it cost when this team fails to achieve a top objective? This can be dollars, but you can also use other soft measurements like satisfaction levels.Production and Cost metrics are the big dollars and cents measurements needed to determine what's happening to the money. Success Rate and Cost of Failure are softer measurements. Success Rate should be used primarily to highlight the great things that every department does each year, and...more
At a high level there are only two ways to grow a business: increase sales and decrease costs. Here's a simple management tip that will save you a lot of wasted effort. Before you start looking at the details of each method, you should understand the layout of a simple profit and loss statement and some basic terms your senior management team is...more
Sales is all about helping customers shop for and get what they need or want. It places focus on finding leads, converting leads, and closing the deal. Once those three things are done, all you need to do is deliver the product. So if sales minded people are focused on these 3 things, why separate the sales and orders functions within a...more
The more efficiently you can fill orders the more money you get to keep from each sale. If you sell an extra $10 product you may only get to keep $1 or $2 after you finish paying for the product, warehouses, salaries, etc. But if you can find a way to do something for $10 less than you're doing it now you get to keep the whole $10. This is one of the basic views of business from an operations, or orders fulfillment perspective. It is commonly broken down into four main steps:1. Sell a product or service2. Source the parts and labor3. Build the product or prepare the service4. Deliver the product or service to the customerThe end goal is to provide a solution that the customer is happy with so you can collect payment.SellThe selling stage of the fulfillment cycle is lead generation, conversion and closing all rolled into one. From the perspective of the operations team (the team that needs to deliver whatever the sales team has sold, or fulfill the order) a sale is what gets the cycle started. SourceSourcing is the activity of gathering together all of the raw materials and labor required to fulfill the order. The sourcing team is responsible for purchasing raw materials such as...more
A "Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure" is when a lender accepts a deed to the homeowner's property in foreclosure instead of continuing the foreclosure process and incurring more expenses to get the deed anyway. However, this does not mean the homeowner is...more
A secured loan is a loan that is available to homeowners, and this is because these loans are secured against the home. With equity levels rising steeply over recent years, secured loans have become a popular, affordable, and effective way for many...more
According to officials from the Office of Fair Trading many people may be paying way over the odds for their credit card borrowing, and the lenders that provide these cards could be raking in around £400 million every year simply because of the...more
It is important that you do your homework before you make an application for a loan, as this will not only help to ensure affordability for you, but could also help to speed up the whole process, enabling you to get the loan you need without any...more
Many of us take our bank accounts for granted these days but it is important to remember that bank accounts are not available to everyone, and these accounts are vital in helping most of us to run our day to day finances. There are a number of...more
If you are a homeowner in the UK and you are looking to borrow money for one of a wide range of purposes, then you can enjoy an added advantage compared to non-homeowners, and this is the ability to use your home as security. Your home can act as a...more