Cash flow Planning for Sailing Through Tough Times

At the end of the day, whatever Stimulus Package the government may provide, it’s all about financial management and in particular Cash Flow management during this tough period.

If your business can survive the next 6 months (since the beginning of the crisis) and potentially recover, then you must pay attention to the following.

Priority First Step – 13-weeks Rolling Cash Flow Forecast

In addition to scenario planning for the next 12-18 months, the most important first step is to draw up a 13-week Rolling Cashflow Forecast. Most accountants will do a month-by-month 12-month forecast. In times of crisis, this is not good enough. You need a 13-week, week-by-week rolling forecast. This simple tool is your most important dashboard during this crisis.

You start by knowing how much cash you have and how much cash you expect to flow into your business for the next 13 weeks. Deduct from this all your projected payments and expenses each week and you will see your cash position each week. Week by week.

The first time this is established is painful hard work. But you have no choice. This is a MUST DO, no compromise.

Once you do the first one, each week requires updating and adding another week forward to compensate for the week that just passed. This allows you to see your cash position 13 weeks forward. It helps avoid being caught with a cash flow crunch you missed picking up, allowing you to plan accordingly.  

[Please email success@peterlamcoach.com for a Free 13-week Rolling Cashflow Forecast template]

A. Strategies when Facing Cashflow Challenges

1. Aggressively collect debt and receivables. Be gentle in your approach, especially when calling your debtors. Be understanding but, you must also be firm in reaching some agreements on payment timings.

2. Start “cash on delivery” terms if this is not already a practice. Give one-off special discounts for cash purchases if necessary, to get customers started on this.

3. Give a better price for advance orders with payment made (eg. for orders from April to June).  At least secure a deposit or partial payment.

4. Clear all stocks. Convert your inventory into cash, even old/slow-moving items. Offer special deals to your best customers.

5. Request longer terms from suppliers. Negotiate and seek support and understanding. Talk to all your creditors if you have to delay payments but keep your commitments.

6. Sell possible non-critical assets to get cash (eg cars that are seldom used or equipment that is under-utilized)

7. Sell shares – get a potential new partner/investor with strong cash flow to pump money into your business.

8. Generate new income streams -look for platforms and networks to start online business and collaboration

9. Secure financing or refinancing from banks/financial institutions. Consider P2P financing or factoring.

To learn more about scenario planning and impact on cashflow, you can read my article on LinkedIn at <https://lnkd.in/fKsHAPN>

B. Cost Cutting Strategies

1. Re-negotiate rental with your landlord

2. Review your budget. Stop all unnecessary expenses (newspaper subscriptions, etc). Close down unprofitable branches/outlets and unprofitable or irrelevant businesses. Focus on cash and profit generators.  

3. Progressively reduce staff allowance, then salaries

4. Rethink using optimum manpower for pivoting to a new business model

C. If Cashflow is Strong

1. consider JV or investing or buying other competitors or brands. Some players may need to be rescued because they are running out of cash.

2. Run aggressive Marketing online and offline to build/strengthen Branding. Not only will this help in the short term, but also in the long term. Your brand will be perceived s a strong, prominent market leader.  

At the end of the day, the moral of the story is – always build up cash reserves! How much is enough reserves? Well, in the past the advice was at least 6 months of operating expenses. But you can see in major crises like this, even that is barely enough. Perhaps that’s why solid companies like Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway have multi-billion-dollar cash hoards, not to mention other cash-rich behemoths like Alphabet and Facebook. Locally, just look at the cash reserves of YTL Corp and Genting.

( The 6 Skills Effective Leaders Continuously Practice)  

It’s been acknowledged that a company is only as good as it’s leadership. Put another way, we can liken the level of leadership to the ceiling for growth, achievement or success of any given organization.

It’s likely, therefore, your organization is no different. And, hence, it’s no surprise that business and corporate leaders and entrepreneurs continuously strive to hone their leadership skills. And, there is the good news. Yes, I often tell the clients that I coach, leadership is a learnable skill, and we continuously need to get better at it.

Here are six core skills to get good at in your quest to up your leadership ante.

1. Be Authentic

Effective leaders are authentic. They don’t wear masks. They are not two-faced. Who they are to the Board, to their direct – reports, to the shop – floor staff, to their customers, suppliers or investors is the same person. Jack Welch, the iconic former Chairman and CEO of GE, called it being “comfortable in your own skin.” And when it came crunch time, that was the ultimate criteria he used to pick Jeff Immelt as his successor in what was a very close 3 – horse race.

There is a certain sense of integrity about someone who’s authentic and this leads to trust. And relationships get better with strong trust, things move along and get done faster too.

2. Communicate and Connect with your Team.

Another skill effective leaders practice is purposeful communication with their team. They practice great listening skills, listening with both their head and their heart.   

And, they make time to communicate with people – not only in a Town Hall gathering or in an email announcement, but one-to-one, especially with the most valuable people in their team. They’re also comfortable mingling with other staff at the Company Cafeteria.

One of my favorite coaching questions is “How much time have you spent one-to-one with your direct reports this week?”

3. Be the Example

Yes, walk the talk, lead by example. When you want to implement change, when you want to instill a high-performance culture, when you want to have more open communication, when you want better customer response and engagement, you have to lead the change.

Not just tell them the way, but actually show them the way.

4. Delegate and Set Clear Direction

Effective leaders are always thinking ahead. They are visionary and able to “vision-cast” clearly and vividly communicate where they’re headed. This is not just about the company’s  long term vision. It includes providing direction on projects, tasks and assignments, even in spelling out clearly a set of KPI’s – Key Performance Indicators.

Effective leaders are good delegators too. They know how to delegate tasks and assignments effectively to achieve results, while developing their team’s skills.

5. Empower and Give Space

Once you’ve briefed your team on the direction, the project or task, you need to empower them to get it done. Give them the necessary resources, guidelines and time-frames. Give them space and a free-hand to execute and implement. And monitor their progress. This allows them to dig into their own resources and capabilities to get things done.

Micro-management stifles creativity and initiative, probably the only time you should  micro-manage is when you have a rookie team member or a poor performer on their way out…

In essence, you’re grooming the next batch of leaders for your organization.

6. Give Feedback

Too often leaders wait for year-end appraisal time to give feedback, if at all.  Many times I’ve spoken to my clients’ team and asked them how often they receive feedback on their performance. Unfortunately, the common response is “hardly” or “very seldom”.

Part of building capacity, helping people grow and developing future leaders is to provide timely feedback-the good as well as the opportunities to improve!

Develop the habit of practicing these six skills. Constantly improve on each one, monitor   how you’re doing in each skills. Get feedback on how you’re doing in each of these areas. As a leader you need feedback too, so you can keep getting better. As they say, “feedback is the breakfast of champions”.

‘If we are a good team and know what we want to do, one of us can defeat ten of them.’

-Jack Ma

Imagine if you had no staff and you had to do everything in your business. Build your marketing machine, get customers, prepare reports, check the inventory, plan the purchases, …

Imagine if you did have a team but they’re under – performing… customer complaints, less sales opportunities, error and defects, inter-departmental conflicts, low morale..

Now, imagine if you had a team that was firing on all cylinders!

Wouldn’t that be magic, pure joy? No doubt about it, whether you have an online or brick and mortar business, a great high-performing team gives you immense leverage.

In fact, a top performing team could even be your Blue Ocean strategy.

So how do you achieve that?  

Here are the 7 Keys To A High – Performance Team for maximum leverage.

1. Have an Inspiring Vision

And articulate it vividly and clearly. Steve Jobs’ vision was ‘helping to change the world’. Isn’t that a compelling vision? As an employee or team member, wouldn’t you be inspired to be a part of that?

Li Ka – Shing put it this way. “Vision is perhaps our greatest strength… it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries, it lends shape to the unknown.

So, what’s your compelling and inspiring vision for your business?

2. Align your Team

Once you’ve got your inspiring vision down pat, you need to communicate it clearly, powerfully and consistently.

Your team needs to be aligned. This is where a strong Company Culture is vital.

A simple way to look at Company Culture is “this is the way we do things around here.”

Define and articulate what are the half dozen core values (practices) in your company. I call it the glue that keeps the company together.

3. Systems and Procedures

To have a well – oiled organization and a high – performing team, you also need to have proper systems and procedures in place. This could be an enterprise – wide IT – based solution or a set of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) or both.

4. The Right People on the Bus

Making sure you have the right people is obviously key. Just like a chef must get the right ingredients to prepare his signature dish, you need to have the right people to build your high – performing team.

What recruitment system, process and procedures have you installed into your business to attract (and retain) the right people?

5. Keep your Top Performers

Do you provide the Rewards, the Recognition and the stimulating yet conducive Environment to retain your good people? In short is your company an uplifting, challenging yet supportive and fulfilling place to work in?

Keep learning, Keep growing your people

Do you provide training and development opportunities for your team? In this Digital Age, we have to keep getting better or lose out. Period.

Many local business people worry about sending their staff for training for fear they will leave or get “pinched” by their competitors after training. Sir Richard Branson has this to say – “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

Ask yourself, what’s the cost of not training your team? What’s the cost of average performance vs top performance?

6. Open and Clear Communication

Communication is the lubricant for high – performing teams. It’s absolutely critical to have open and clear communication so that you get timely feedback across the company. This allows you to respond efficiently and speedily before any crisis, as well as take advantage of opportunities.

Open communication is the fertilizer for team Synergy. Good communication also means the team is kept informed and up to date when decisions are made or new policies, procedure or programs are implemented.

A good team plays as one in unison.

7. Effective Management and Elegant Leadership

Finally, we still need to provide leadership, to drive the vision and culture home. And, to inspire and build more leaders. On a day-to-day basis, we also need to manage the projects, the initiatives, the policies and procedures. Management is needed to operate efficiently. Leadership ensures we’re focusing on the right things, ie. our effectiveness.

So those are the seven keys to building and keeping a high-performing team.

How do you score in each of these seven areas?

We hope this inspires you a bit to build a great (or even better) team.

To Your Success,

P/S : Give us a call or drop us a note if you need some help or more information.

Recently the EPF announced its dividend for 2015. Given that 2015 was a challenging year, a 6.4% dividend is not bad. At least it’s higher than bank deposit rates and official inflation numbers!

If you’re in business, your business should be generating good dividends too, shouldn’t it?

Here are 7 things you can do to build a strong business that pays you handsome dividends every year.

1. Protect Your Margins

Always protect your gross margins. If your costs go up (packaging and raw materials, transport and delivery costs, exchange rate, etc), you need to find ways to either raise your prices or trim costs elsewhere.

A strong brand (think Milo or Nescafe) with clear and definite uniqueness will help you command your margin and also price.

2. Business Growth

Your business has to keep growing. At least in tandem with population and economic growth. Unless you’re in a sunset industry (eg. camera film!), your business needs to grow from year to year. What new products or services are you adding or launching? How are you getting new clients and customers? What can you do to get customers to buy more from you?

3. Differentiation or Uniqueness

If you’re Guinness Stout, there’s not much direct competition. However, we’re not always so fortunate to have little or no direct competition. What makes you unique or different from others in your industry? Is it a unique customer or user experience, is it your years of experience or specific expertise? Or is it your brand or product range? Perhaps it’s even the brand strength of your principal or your distribution network?

4. Customer Service

Very often, people tell me they provide good service. Doesn’t everyone claim that? What’s unique or so great about your service? Is it an extended warranty at no extra cost? Or, perhaps, a goods returnable satisfaction policy within 7 days of purchase?

What does your business do or provide to ensure a customer service rating of 8 or 9 if not 10?

5. Sound, Competitive Strategy

Very often businesses run short-term promotions to boost sales. Nothing wrong with running promotions from time to time. But these are short-term tactics. What happens to sales after the promotion… normally it nose-dives.

It pays to develop a sound business strategy.

Does your business have a strong, competitive strategy to stay ahead of the game?

6. Consistent Marketing

Marketing is the engine of any business. Without good marketing, it’s unlikely your business can grow. All too often, however, business owners do not sustain their marketing efforts. They either give up too soon or lose focus. Sometimes, they succumb to “Trial and Error” marketing instead of “Test and Measure” marketing – and that’s such a great tragedy. In today’s fast-paced world, Marketing has to be more scientific.

7. Leverage Your Team

First, you have to build your team. Once you done that, leverage your team. A strong team highly skilled, highly motivated and high performing, will run circles around your competition.

So, there you have it. Seven essential pillars to building a solid business that gives you rewarding returns. Every year. To learn more about how to build a strong, profitable business successfully, why not join us on 24th March 2016 at our Quarterly Business Kickstarter?

Take your business higher! Enrol for Business Kickstarter now! Bring your team! Share this with your friends, suppliers and customers. Click here for details.

To your success,
Coach Peter Lam
Business Growth Strategist and Team Alignment Coach

Many Business Owners select a Marketing tactic and jump straight into execution. Very often there’s no strategy behind the tactic. Then, it doesn’t work, results are poor and they dump it, blame the tactic (e.g. flyers, telemarketing, facebook ads, direct mail) and say it doesn’t work for them.

Sound familiar?

Here are 5 things you must do to get Better Marketing Results.

The 5 Marketing Fundamentals

1. Have a Marketing Budget

Marketing is an on-going process. Have a pre-set Marketing Budget, just like you budget for salary before hiring or budget for machinery and equipment before adding a production line.

Many people just do ad-hoc marketing and decide to spend maybe RM 5,000 on a flyer or Google ads. Marketing has to be consistent to be effective. So start by setting a budget and allocating how you will invest it.

2 Monitor and Control

One you’ve set your budget, you need to monitor the results and control your spending. What are you monitoring? Here are a few important ones :-

i) How many responses or enquiries did your marketing piece / activity generate?

ii) How many of these enquiries turned into actual sales?

iii) How much was the average invoice?

iv) Did the increase in sales more than cover the spending to generate the sales?

v) What did it cost per new customer?

vi) What did it cost per new enquiry?

vii) If the marketing piece was a promotion targeted at existing customers, did they
buy more?

Knowing these critical numbers will help you make better decisions for your next Marketing activity and help you fine tune your current one.

3. Test, Test, Test

It’s a shocking statistics, but 80% of Marketing doesn’t work. If all marketing worked, life would be easy, isn’t it?

So, it’s imperative that we test every bit of our Marketing. That’s what big successful companies like Coca-Cola, Apple and Nike do. For example, they test their headline, their offer, the colour used, the medium used even the day of week.

Testing helps refine and hone down what works best with our target market – which brings us to the next fundamental.

4. Understand Your Target

Take the time to really understand your target. Who’s your primary target?

Your target could be women, for example. But exactly what sort of women? Young, old? Are they career women or home-makers? Are they middle income or higher income? What sort of hand-bag do they carry? Where would they go shopping? How often? Do they cook or mainly eat out?

Starting to get the idea?

All these things have an impact on the Marketing that we develop and ultimately on the results of our Marketing efforts.

5. Set clear objectives for each campaign

When I was an Advertising man many years ago, I’d wonder why clients always want to achieve so many things with one campaign. Yet the most effective marketing is usually single-minded. We might have 5 objectives, but to get the best results, each Marketing activity should focus on one over-riding objective – e.g. to generate trial or to generate enquiries or to increase bulk purchase, etc.

So there you have it. Five fundamentals that will help you get better Marketing results.

Get started with one and move on to the next. Keep at it until it becomes systematic and automatic and see your results soar.

All the best.

Happy New Year!

Hope you had a terrific celebration.

Now it’s time to start work.

Over the years, we have found that starting the year right, starting the year STRONG, can make all the difference between a so-so year and a Great year.

Step 1 – Set Clear Goals

If you haven’t already a plan in place for 2016, it’s not too late to start. As you warm up into the new year (only 2 working days have passed), take some time to chart the course for your business in 2016.

Many of you would have made some New Year resolutions I’m sure. Be sure you’ve written them down. This is the first step to success. If you haven’t already, write down your Top 3 -5 goals. Make sure they are concrete, specific and measurable. Why? Because if you can’t measure your goals, you won’t be able to monitor progress and you might as well say goodbye to that “goal”.

And, be sure to have at least one of your goals a numeric goal. Yes, one of your goals has to be a numerical goal – e.g. increase sales by 20% or reduce Days Outstanding from 60 to 55 days, or increase gross margin by 2%.

Step 2 – Prepare a detailed Plan

Once you’ve got your top goals down pat, the next step is to prepare your Action Plan. What do you need to do to achieve those goals? What strategies will drive your business? When do those activities need to get started? What resources do you need? Who will help you with implementation? What other preparation do you need to achieve your goals?

Step 3 – Implementation

Once you’ve got your plan done, run it through with your team. Make sure everyone is clear on what needs to be done and who’s responsible for what.

Implementation is the key to success.

The plan is like a roadmap, but you still need to make the trip –  the actual journey. If you’re climbing Mount Kinabalu, you need to book the flights, arrange for a mountain guide, decide who’s bringing what and actually make the climb! The more you prepare for the climb, the smoother the climb will be.

Same with business. The better your plan, the smoother the implementation.

Step 4 – Progress Monitoring

As you go along, check your progress. Celebrate when you reach your milestones. Make course corrections when necessary.

So, there you go, Four simple steps to START STRONG – Move Fast – and Finish Stronger.

All the best for 2016!

In today’s fast-paced digital world, we’re constantly struggling to get everything done. We’re always trying to get more done, wishing there were more hours in the day. Nope. There aren’t 36 hours in the day. And the Time Travel machine has still not been invented.

But the good news is, there are a few practical hacks you can use to get more done in your day and increase your and your team’s productivity.

1. Do it, Defer it, Delegate it or Dump it

( There’s 4 D’s there already!)

This age old principle is time – tested. Whenever you open an email or WhatsApp message or pick up a physical document or letter, make a decision. Decide whether to handle it straight away (Do it ). Or handle it at a later time – but schedule when (Defer it) ,or delegate it to one of your team (Delegate it) or decide no action is required (Dump it).

This one technique, also known as “single-handling” will save you at least 15-30 minutes a day.

2. Dare to Decide

To practice the above “Do it, Defer it, Delegate it or Dump it” principle, you have to make a quick decisions. It takes a bit of practice but after a while it’ll become second-nature. Just get started on adopting this principle – just make a decision. If you don’t feel comfortable with your decision to Do it or Defer it for example, you can always change your mind or learn from it afterwards… “next time, on matters like this, I’ll defer it.” Or vice – versa.

By exercising a decision, your “decision-making muscle” becomes stronger and you become more confident.

Motivate yourself to build this habit by focusing on the reward of saving 15-30 minutes or more each day.

3. Diarize Daily

This is another great habit to develop. Plan your daily diary or schedule the evening before. You should have already planned your entire week in advance, but now as you approach a new day, it’s good to review that original plan scheduled perhaps a week ago, and put in more detail.

But planning the next day the evening before, you get off to a great start every day. You’re clear what exactly your day will look like, what the priorities are for the day and how you will start your day. There’s little room for ambiguity or pondering and wondering what to do next in the next hour.

The other benefit of scheduling or planning your day the evening before is you also get to review your current day. What went well, what results did you achieve and what can you do better the next day?

4. Discipline

Yes, at the end of the day, time management is about self-management. It’s really about self discipline. Scheduling your day with tasks and activities is one thing. But keeping to your schedule and working on the pre-scheduled priorities takes discipline. It’s often easy to lose focus, get distracted or wonder off-course doing something else, something that’s perhaps easier or more fun ……. like checking WhatsApp messages or having a coffee with someone who just popped by !

It’s easy to keep appointments with others, but it often requires a lot of discipline to keep appointments with ourselves – to do the necessary and important things that we must do, whether we like it or not.  Like planning, strategizing and reviewing.

And, sometimes, we need an external party to help us stay on track. That could be your PA, your wife or perhaps a business coach. In any case, if you practice this 4 D’s of great time management your performance will soar.

We have a special coaching programme to help you and your team get a hold of your time, productivity and performance. Call us for a no-obligation free consult or email success@peterlamcoach.com for more information about how to stop Procrastination – the Thief of Time!  

A Plan for 2016?? … Or a waste of Time… ?

[what we can learn from Unilever, Google….]

Many business owners feel planning is a waste of time. Especially in uncertain times like this. How can you predict or anticipate where the Ringgit will be next year? How can you plan when there is so much uncertainty?

Yet, we all know successful companies like Unilever, Samsung, Google, Toyota, etc, always do their business plan or annual plan. Always. Without fail. They know the plan will change or be updated as they go along, but they never neglect it. And they start their planning process early too, way before the end of their financial year. Why is that?

Five Important Reasons Why Planning is Critical for Business Success

1. Planning gives clarity

The value of planning is not so much the plan itself but the process of going through the planning. Planning forces us to think through things, to evaluate and consider different elements of business.

2. Planning gets the Company Prepared

By thinking through each aspect of our business we are getting every department prepared and ready for implementation. Whether it’s the launch or introduction of a new product or building up inventory for a peak period or promotion.

3. Planning helps us anticipate

Through the process of planning we are able to foresee and anticipate any potential challenges, hurdles or obstacles in the way of achieving our plan. This helps keep us one step ahead.

4. Planning helps us more faster

As a result of all the above – greater clarity, problem-anticipation, and preparedness, we are able to move faster, to execute better.

5. Planning saves time.

The net effect is – planning is Not a waste of time. In fact, it actually saves us time and allows us to more faster with greater clarity.

So, make sure you get your 2016 plan done!

If you haven’t got your 2016 plan done yet, why not join us for Profit Plan 2016? Click here for details.