I recently read a summary of a book called The Second Mountain, by David Brooks, and it inspired me to write this blog. One common thing all humans share is the goal to be happy. And we believe that being successful will make us happy. But what is success? Too often many of us adopt…
We all get so busy in our businesses and often forget to keep a pipeline of new prospects flowing for when things are slower… I know I do! It is so easy to stop marketing when you have so much work to do that you cannot imagine taking on new business. The very idea might…
I recently read an article that quite frankly shocked me. I didn’t think that our educational standards were quite so low in Canada. Nor did I realize that it impacts business as much as the article I have linked below implies. One thing I have noticed in Canada is how poor our technical infrastructure is.…
What? Risks of cloud-based software? As anyone who regularly reads my blog, you may be startled by that headline! Well, of course, there are risks in everything in life, and cloud-based accounting is no exception. The risk in using cloud-based accounting software is there, and I have written about this before, so this Blog is…
A system is designed to create efficiencies and ease and, most importantly, predictable outcomes. People should not have to think through each step. Systems need to be living organisms, where people are empowered to modify the systems (with oversight) to create an environment of constant improvement. When your business creates an environment of problem-solving people…
I get frequently asked if cloud-based accounting is secure. My answer – “what has you think desktop computing is secure?” The answer I hear most often is something like this – “I want to control my own data; I don’t trust putting it online. What if someone hacks into it?” The other risk people fear…
As an accounting firm, we are surprisingly often in the midst of great change. And the biggest changes we go through with our clients are conversions. This is where we take a business on a legacy system and convert their accounting software, systems, and processes to cloud-based software. Also, in the dynamic world of real-time…
A lot of business people make the mistake of assuming their customers know the true value of their product or service. The truth is because we intimately know what we offer, we mistakenly just assume that our customers will just know that too! They don’t. So they need to be educated. How do you go…
As I have written in a prior Blog, a bad debt costs you much more than the actual bad debt. What do I mean? Well, it’s simple math. A bad debt of $12,000 becomes a fixed cost to your business that month. To recover that expense you need to generate more sales to recover. It…
I very often see a pattern that when businesses (or people) are doing great financially, they go wild in their spending. The economy is booming, and things are just popping – new customers are flowing, the market is up-up-up. Your industry is flourishing. (Think Vancouver real estate a few years ago!)… Then – pop –…