Author's Articles

• 04
  Feb

  10 Ways to Increase Your Profit Margins

  Businesses, Money & Legal

  Many business owners think you need to increase sales substantially to make more money. But often that’s too difficult, especially in the short term. Take, for example, the prospective client I met a year or so ago in difficulty. He kept on and on about increasing sales to new customers. But I worked out that his average sale per customer and his prospect conversion rate were so low that he needed 3,750 meeti

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• 10
  Jan

  Control your financial mess

  Businesses, Featured

  Last year a banking contact referred me to a business that was in what can only be described as a total financial mess. Although their accountant was preparing their GST returns, she never went to meet them and hadn’t helped beyond that. Things were dire. This is some of what I found:

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• 04
  Dec

  How to Learn More about Your Competitors

  Businesses, Featured, Sales & Marketing

  There are many reasons why you need to learn more about your competitors but my three favourites are:  To avoid their mistakes.   Copy and build upon what they do right.  Know their weak points when quoting against or taking their customers off them. Generally, benchmarking can be useful to find out about your competitors. Of course, benchmarking data does have its shortcomings. For example: it might b

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• 04
  Oct

  Eight Tips on Managing Your Cash Flow

  Businesses, Featured, Money & Legal

  Whether your business is growing or struggling, managing your cash flow effectively is absolutely essential, and for many, the very key to business survival. You've probably heard the statistic that over 60% of businesses that go bust are still profitable, but just ran out of cash. From a cash point of view, a business is like a sponge—it sucks in ever increasing amounts of cash, and, to get it back out again,

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