A night of insight from ATB Partners and friends! (From Left to Right) – Wayne Schmidt, Paul Rattray, Meena, Michael Mekhitarian, Jennifer Vella and Jim Vass. One fine team!
I am still on an intellectual high after the informative “Simplify & Re-Gain Control of your Business in Real Time with Cloud Accounting for SMEs” held by ATB Partners and Telstra Western Sydney.
The event was held at Blacktown Workers Club (Sydney, NSW) and it featured the guy Wayne Schmidt who brought the amazing Xero Accounting Platform to Australia in his previous life. Wayne spent some time talking through the advantages, uses and key features of the Xero Platform and I was a convert some years ago (where Jim Vass one of the ATB Partners encouraged me to use it!).
Basically, if you are in Small Business it’s a low monthly subscription “Accounting Platform” which owns the SME market in that you can synchronize it with your bank feeds, keep track of your numbers, send out invoices quickly, generate nice reports and all that – basically, it IS AWESOME AND I LOVE IT.
In the not so old days, many Small Businesses would have a weak grasp on their numbers at best – at times reviewing the “Financial Health” of their business 12 months onwards, whereas with Xero you can have it live within 24 hours most of the time.
One point that was made over and over again which seemed obvious to my Accounting Friends but was honestly news to me as a Sales & Marketing Mentor was:
– The #1 Reason why Businesses go broke is due to lack of Cash-Flow!
“Cash-Flow” is basically how much “Actual-Cash” you have in your business. You can have people owing you $20,000+ but if you have only $0.88 in your bank account (which yes I did when I was in start-up) you can lose your business very quickly! This problem happened to me earlier on. I was great at billing people, BUT I had a lot of people just not paying me. It was tough on me in that on paper I was a “Success” but I was living from day to day with massive stress.
After taking some great advice, I got on top of this, ceased work for people just not paying me and turned everything around in a good hard 3 – 4 months of tight Financial Management which rocked.
I always thought that businesses went broke because they didn’t get enough clients, but learning that “Cash-Flow” is the main issue was a massive revelation to me. I got into lots of trouble but I learned my lesson.
My advice and learnings from tonight? If you are say not from a Financial Professional like myself, you really need to make sure you have sound financial management in your business. Be it you are making sure people pay you, taking on the right clients and hiring awesome Accountants to support you!
Jim Vass, Paul Rattray and Michael Mekhitarian from ATB Partners Rock! A great presentation tonight and they gave me some great insight into what I did wrong, what many businesses owners get into trouble with and talking positive – how to put easy processes in place to make you stronger and stronger!
Thank you for the read, it was a great event and looking forward to the next one! Edward Zia – Marketing Mentor who Appreciates Great Accounting!
No responses yet