by MHolland | Oct 2, 2026 | Business Tips, Cash Flow, Systems
What is the biggest failure point for most businesses?
Lack of systems? Not enough working capital? Weak operational expertise? Bad customer service?
All of these hurt. No question. But none of them is the biggest one.
The biggest failure point in any business is this: failure to implement.
Let me explain.
🍔 The McDonald’s Lesson
What impresses you most about McDonald’s?
Yeah, yeah. We know it is not the food.
Is it their systems? They do have a system for everything. And I mean everything. How long the fries sit. How the burger gets wrapped. How the floor gets mopped.
But systems are not the secret. Lots of businesses have systems.
The secret is this: McDonald’s implements its systems, and then monitors adherence to them. Every shift. Every location. Every day.
What good is a system if no one checks whether it is being followed? Nothing gets done. Or it gets done poorly. Usually both.
📚 The Binder on the Shelf
I see this all the time.
A business hires great coaches and consultants. They map out, in minute detail, exactly what is needed to perform. There are org charts. There are Standard Operating Procedures for everything. Beautifully formatted. Neatly organized.
And they sit in a binder on a shelf.
No one is implementing them. No one is checking. So the business keeps running on habit, memory, and heroics.
That is not a systems problem. That is an implementation problem.
And it is the single biggest cause of breakdown and chaos in any business.
🔧 You Will Not Know Until You Do
Here is the thing about implementation. It is not just about getting things done. It is how you learn.
Until you implement, you will not know your failure points. You will not know if the system itself needs tweaking.
A system on paper is a theory. A system in action is data.
So you implement. Then you adjust. Then you implement again.
And for every process that drives your results, you need someone responsible for monitoring adherence. Not hoping. Not assuming. Monitoring.
⚖️ The Simplest Diet in the World
There are a million diets out there. I am sure plenty of them work.
But the simplest way I have found to lose weight? Track everything you eat. Weigh yourself daily.
That is it.
Why does it work? Two reasons:
- You quickly see what you are actually eating, not what you think you are eating.
- The daily weigh-in tells you, without opinion, whether it is working.
Your business is no different. Track what is really happening. Measure it against the outcome you want. The truth shows up fast.
📝 How to Start: Four Steps
1️⃣ Document what you actually do.
Not what you think you do. Not what the SOP says. What really happens, day to day.
2️⃣ Hold it up against your outcomes.
Ask yourself: does this serve the outcomes I am committed to? Or does it detract from them?
3️⃣ Decide what to change.
- What do I need to eliminate?
- What do I need to add?
- What just needs tweaking?
4️⃣ Document what you want to manage. Then manage it!
This is the step most businesses skip. Writing it down is not the finish line. It is the starting line.
🎯 Make Your Standards Reality-Based
One last thing. Your Performance Standards must be black and white. Things that are either done or not done.
❌ “We provide excellent customer service.”
✅ “Every customer email gets a response within 4 business hours.”
❌ “We keep the books up to date.”
✅ “Bank reconciliations are completed by the 5th of every month.”
Motherhood statements feel good. They will not move your business forward. You cannot monitor a feeling. You can monitor a deadline.
Final Takeaway
Great systems do not build great businesses.
Implemented systems do.
Document it. Implement it. Monitor it. Adjust it. Repeat.
Thanks for reading…
by MHolland | Sep 4, 2026 | Business Tips, Cash Flow, Selling Tips, Systems
I send money to Africa most months.
Our projects in Kenya — the school feeding programs, the permaculture gardens — need funds on the ground, and Remitly is how I get them there. I have been using them for years. Same app, same routine, barely a thought.
Then last week an offer popped up on my screen. Join their membership club. Pay a small monthly fee. Get preferred rates on every transfer.
I stopped and stared at it for a good while. Not as a customer. As an accountant.
Then I joined anyway.
Because something clever is going on here…
Loyalty Cards Just Grew Up
You know the loyalty card. Buy nine coffees, get the tenth free. Starbucks built a global empire partly on a rewards app that most of their customers open before they even leave the house.
The idea is old and it works. You are not out hunting strangers. You are getting the customers you already have to come back more often.
Regular readers will recognize this. It is Way #2 of the 4 Ways to Grow a Business — increase your transaction frequency. The number of times each customer buys from you.
Remember, sales are not one thing. Sales are three things:
Number of active customers x how often they buy x what they spend each time.
Transaction frequency sits right in the middle of that formula. And it is far cheaper to move than dragging new customers in from the cold marketplace.
Membership clubs are the next evolution of that old punch card. And they are a serious step up. Here is why…
“Wait. A Discount? Doesn’t That Defeat the Whole Purpose?”
That is the first thing most owners say to me.
You hand out a preferred rate. You make less per transaction. How on earth is that growth?
Fair question. Let us do the math, because the math is where this gets fun.
Say you distribute specialty food products. You have 800 active customers. The average order is $400, the average customer orders six times a year, and your gross margin is 30%.
So a typical customer is worth $2,400 in sales and $720 in gross margin per year.
Now you launch a club. Twenty-five dollars a month — $300 a year — for 8% off every order and free delivery.
Scenario one: nobody changes their behaviour at all.
Your member still orders six times. Still $2,400 of product.
- Sales after the 8% discount: $2,208
- Product cost (unchanged at 70% of $2,400): $1,680
- Gross margin: $528
- Plus the membership fee: $300
- Total: $828
Against $720 before. You are ahead by $108, and not one person changed a single habit.
Read that again. The fee covered the discount before the customer did anything differently.
Scenario two: they behave the way members actually behave.
Now they order nine times instead of six, because they are a member and they have already paid for the privilege.
- Sales after discount on $3,600 of product: $3,312
- Product cost: $2,520
- Gross margin: $792
- Plus the fee: $300
- Total: $1,092
That is $372 more gross margin per member per year. Sign up 150 of your 800 customers and you have just added roughly $55,000 to your bottom line without adding a single new customer.
Run your own numbers, of course. Mine are illustrative. But the shape of it holds up in most businesses I look at.
Three Things a Club Does That a Punch Card Never Could
One — they stop shopping you.
This is the big one and it never shows up on a financial statement.
The moment somebody pays a fee to be your member, they stop comparing you to your competitors. The comparing just quietly ends. They have already decided. Every visit to a competitor’s website now feels like a small betrayal of money they have already spent.
You have moved from being an option to being their supplier.
Two — the fee pool pays for the discounts.
Here is the quiet beauty of it. Not everybody uses their membership hard.
Some members will transact constantly and genuinely extract every dollar of that discount. Plenty of others will pay the fee and use it twice a year. Their fees fund the heavy users’ discounts. Spread across a few hundred or a few thousand members, the pool covers the giveaway.
Gyms have understood this for fifty years.
Three — they become a member.
Do not underestimate this one. People are wired to want to belong to something.
A discount is a transaction. A membership is an identity. One is about price, the other is about being on the inside. That is why the second one earns loyalty and the first one only ever rents it.
It Is Not Just Money Transfers
Another company I know offers a Premium Membership. Very small monthly fee, preferred rates per kilo on shipping. Exactly the same architecture as Remitly.
Their customers come back. They ship more. And the fee income across thousands of members quietly absorbs the discounts.
What This Could Look Like in Your Business
Here is where it gets interesting, because almost nobody in the small and mid-sized world is doing this yet.
A restaurant. A monthly fee gets members first call on reservations, a standing table on Fridays, invitations to tastings and winemaker dinners, and 10% off the bill. You have just converted occasional diners into regulars.
A professional services firm. Guaranteed response times. A quarterly strategy call. First access to new offerings. Priority in busy season. Response time alone is worth a fee to most clients, because waiting is the thing they hate most.
A trades business. An annual fee covers two maintenance visits, priority emergency dispatch, and preferred rates on parts and labour. HVAC companies who do this well never have an empty week in the shoulder seasons.
A retailer. Early access to new stock, a members-only evening twice a year, free alterations, preferred pricing.
A greenhouse grower. Members get first pick of the spring inventory before it hits the public, plus a per-flat rate.
You get the idea. Take your best customers, ask what they would pay to be treated better, and build the package around the answer.
Before You Launch, Do These Five Things
- Cost the perks out fully. Every one of them. If your response-time promise means paying somebody overtime, that is a real cost and it belongs in the model.
- Size the fee against the discount. This is the whole ballgame. Your fee has to cover the discount at your customers’ current frequency. If you offer 20% off for ten dollars a month, you have built a machine for destroying your own margin. Do the arithmetic before you print the brochure.
- Load up on perks that cost little and feel like a lot. Access. Priority. Early notice. Invitations. A named person who answers the phone. These are nearly free to give and enormously valuable to receive. Lean on them heavily and keep the price discount modest.
- Test small. Pick one segment, run it for ninety days, and see what actually happens. Do not roll it out to your whole customer base on a hunch.
- Measure the right thing. Not how many members you signed up. Measure transaction frequency per member, gross margin per member, and retention against your non-members. Vanity metrics will happily lie to you for a year.
One Warning
Be careful with your A clients.
Some of your very best customers buy from you because they trust you, not because of price. Price has never come up. Dangling a discount at them can cheapen a relationship you spent a decade building, and you will have handed away margin nobody was asking you for.
For those clients, build the club around access and service, not price. Let the discount do its work further down the ladder, where it will actually change behaviour.
In Closing
Any business with recurring, loyal, repeat customers is the envy of every business without them.
Membership clubs are one of the few tools I know of that let you buy that loyalty with your own customers’ money. Remitly figured it out. The shipping company figured it out. Almost nobody in the one-to-thirty-million range has even tried.
And me? I have not looked at another transfer service since the day I joined. Not once. I am fairly certain somebody out there beats their rate on any given Tuesday. I no longer care enough to check.
That is exactly what you are buying.
Build a package of goodies. Price it properly. Test it on a corner of your customer base.
Then tell me what happens.
Thanks kindly for reading…
by MHolland | Aug 28, 2026 | Business Tips, Cash Flow, Systems
Forecasts beat budgets. Hands down.
Not because budgets are useless. They have their place. They set direction. They give your bank something to look at.
But if you want to know whether you can make payroll on the 15th, a budget will not tell you.
A forecast will.
A Budget Looks Backwards
Think about how a budget actually gets built.
You pull last year’s numbers. You add a few percent. Maybe you subtract a few percent if you are feeling cautious. You spread it over twelve months, usually in equal chunks, because who really knows what August looks like?
Then you print it. And it sits there.
It is a guess dressed up in a spreadsheet.
And here is the deeper problem — a budget is built by looking backwards. Historical numbers. Last year’s patterns. Then you turn around and point that same information twelve months into the future.
That is binoculars. A wide lens. You can see the shape of the mountain, but you cannot see the rocks in front of your feet.
The scope is too broad. The detail is not refined. And cash does not live in the broad view. Cash lives in the detail.
A Forecast Has Precision
Now flip the tool.
A 13-week cash forecast is a magnifying glass with a laser focus on one quarter. Thirteen weeks. That is it.
Why thirteen? Because it is long enough to see trouble coming, and short enough that you can actually be accurate. Push it out to a year and you are guessing again. Pull it in to two weeks and you are just reading your bank balance.
Thirteen weeks is the sweet spot.
The Four Things You Look At
A cash forecast is not complicated. It is four inputs.
One — what you are owed, and exactly when it is coming.
Not your receivables total. That number is nearly useless on its own. You need timing. Which invoice, from which customer, landing in which week. And be honest here. If a customer has paid you at 52 days for the last two years, do not forecast them at 30.
Two — what you owe, and exactly when you will pay it.
Same discipline. Payroll dates. Rent. Suppliers. Loan payments. Tax remittances — and those are the ones that ambush people. Put them in the week they actually leave your account.
Three — what you plan to bill and sell.
New work. New invoices. What is in the pipeline, and when will it convert to an invoice, and when will that invoice convert to cash? There is a lag on every one of those steps. Build the lag in.
Four — the one-offs.
The equipment purchase. The insurance renewal. The legal bill. The bonus. Every quarter has two or three of these, and every quarter people forget to include them.
That is the whole thing. Four inputs.
The Output Is a Number for Every Friday
Here is what makes this powerful.
A good 13-week forecast predicts your cash balance at the end of each and every week. Not a range. Not a vibe. A number.
| Week |
Opening Cash |
Receipts |
Disbursements |
Closing Cash |
| Week 1 |
$84,000 |
$61,000 |
$72,000 |
$73,000 |
| Week 2 |
$73,000 |
$38,000 |
$95,000 |
$16,000 |
| Week 3 |
$16,000 |
$110,000 |
$54,000 |
$72,000 |
Look at Week 2.
Sixteen thousand dollars. That is a tight week. Maybe a frightening one.
But you are seeing it now. Today. Weeks before it happens. And because you can see it, you have options. Chase two invoices hard. Move a supplier payment by four days. Draw briefly on the line of credit. Have a conversation before it is a crisis instead of after.
Nobody has ever had a cash emergency they saw coming eight weeks out. They had a decision to make, and they made it calmly.
That is the entire point.
Run It Four Quarters and Something Happens
Here is the part most people miss.
The first forecast you build will not be great. You will be off. Some weeks badly off. That is completely fine, and you should expect it.
But do it again next quarter. And the one after. And the one after that.
Four quarters in, a skill has emerged. Not a spreadsheet — a skill. You will start to know, in your bones, how your business converts work into cash. You will know which customers drift. You will know which months lie to you. You will feel the rhythm of your own money.
You cannot buy that. You can only build it, one quarter at a time.
Bring Your Team Into It
Do not do this alone in a locked room.
Whoever touches invoicing should be in it. Whoever touches payables should be in it. Your salespeople should understand that a signed deal is not cash, and that the gap between the two is where businesses die.
When your Team sees the inputs and the outputs, two things change. The forecast gets more accurate, because the people closest to the information are supplying it. And your Team starts thinking about cash on their own — which is worth more than the forecast itself.
Then Comes the Best Part
Once the quarter is running, compare your forecast to your actuals. Week by week. Every week.
Where are the variances?
Then ask the only question that matters: is this a timing problem or an assumption problem?
They are completely different animals.
A timing variance means the cash is coming, just not when you said. The customer paid in Week 6 instead of Week 4. Annoying, but the money is real. The fix is tightening your collection process, or forecasting that customer more honestly next time.
An assumption variance means you were wrong about the world. The sale did not close. The job took three weeks longer. The order got cancelled. The money is not late — it does not exist.
One of those is a process issue. The other is a business issue. If you do not separate them, you will apply the wrong fix, and you will keep being surprised.
Where to Start
You do not need software. You do not need a consultant. You need a spreadsheet and two hours.
Thirteen columns across the top, one for each week. Four blocks down the side — opening cash, receipts, disbursements, closing cash.
Fill it in with what you actually know. Guess where you must, and mark the guesses so you can check them later.
Then look at it every single week for thirteen weeks.
A budget tells you what you hoped for last December. A forecast tells you what is about to happen on Friday.
Only one of those helps you sleep.
Thanks for reading…
by MHolland | Jul 24, 2026 | Accounting Software, Business Tips, Systems
I know. You are firehosed with AI content. I said as much in a previous blog.
And yet, here I am. Writing about it again. 😂
Because it is not going away. And some of it is genuinely powerful. Unlike anything we have seen before in software.
But AI is not a magic bullet. And today I have some cautionary advice.
If your company is operating without detailed systems, AI will not fix that. It will magnify it. Repeat: it will not fix it.
Here is why.
Reason One – It Makes Mistakes With Confidence
AI gets things wrong. Sometimes a lot.
And it delivers the wrong answer with total confidence. That combination will trick you into thinking it has nailed the answer, when it has not.
Reason Two – It Is a Mirror
AI is a perfect reflector of your thinking.
If your instructions, your prompts, your thinking are scattered, weak, or shallow, the AI will reflect that right back at you. Weak inputs. Weak outputs.
You can blame the AI. But it is just a robot. It is a pretty good reflection of you. It is a mirror.
Soooo.
Reason Three – Chaos Meets Chaos
If your business has not been systematized — no workflows, no Performance Standards, no documented outcomes and processes — adding AI to the mix will not clean that up.
It will create chaos on steroids.
The Xero Lesson
How do I speak with such authority on this? Because I watched it happen. Up close.
An associate of mine converted from desktop accounting software to Xero. His old system was more manual. More human-driven.
He came to me almost in tears. Firehosed by daily bank feeds and automations he never asked for. He reverted to his old system.
AI is simply the next chapter of that same story. All of this AI stuff is an evolution of what has been unfolding for twenty years. Cloud-based software has virtually wiped out desktop software.
And it is entirely possible AI now disrupts the cloud-based software industry in ways we cannot yet imagine. It already has. To the tune of $285 billion in market value this past February.
But I digress.
Systems First. Then Play.
Coming back to the real challenge — integrating AI into your business, for systems, for automation, for real work.
Be careful.
Document your workflows, your systems, everything you do, first. On the side, play with AI in simple ways. Get comfortable with how it handles practical, everyday admin work.
Here is an example. The other day I used Claude Cowork to reorganize a ten-year-old folder structure for my company. It gave me a four-part plan. Asked permission. I said fly away, step by step.
I kept working on other things while it restructured and organized my slightly messy folders. Beautifully, I might add.
That was not value-added client work. But it built my confidence in what this thing can actually do. And it expanded my thinking to other areas I had not considered.
Here is another one worth testing. Set a repeating task that surfs the internet for items of interest on any topic you choose. Ask it once. It runs every day and drops a summary report in your inbox.
That single example opens the door to a much bigger idea — working with repeating tasks that run without you.
In Summary
Put systems in place first. Play with AI on the side to get comfortable with it handling routine, admin work. Do that, and you will be ready when it is time to go further.
Thanks for reading…
by MHolland | Jul 10, 2026 | Cash Flow, Systems
Over the years, I have watched a curious pattern repeat itself in businesses of every size and every industry.
A company has a great year. Profits climb. Cash flows in abundantly. New clients arrive, sometimes faster than the team can onboard them. Everything is on the uptick.
And then something shifts.
The owner gets, well, shall I say it? Cocky. Yes, cocky.
They begin to believe the sun will always shine and the rain will never come. And from that belief — usually unspoken, usually unexamined — flows a whole series of decisions that can quietly undo years of careful work.
When the Money Arrives, the Discipline Leaves
Here is what typically happens when cash gets comfortable.
Instead of saving, instead of keeping things tight, the optimism takes over and the spending begins. A larger office. Two new hires that were “needed” but never defined. Software subscriptions that pile up like snow on a roof. A vehicle. Maybe two.
Now, let me be clear about something. Spending is not the problem. I am not preaching austerity for its own sake.
Spending without an intended outcome, and without controls — that is the problem.
Because here is a truth every business owner learns eventually, and some learn painfully: a business expense, once spent, never comes back. That dollar is gone. It does not return when the market softens or when two big clients leave in the same quarter.
So before it leaves your hands, that dollar deserves a moment of your attention.
Every Expense Must Answer One Question
Before you approve any new spending in a good year, ask this simple question:
What is this expense doing for my business?
There are only three legitimate answers. Every dollar you spend should fall into one of these three buckets:
- It increases current revenues.
- It sustains current revenues.
- It builds revenues for the future.
That is the entire filter. Three buckets, nothing more.
An expense that increases current revenue might be an additional salesperson in a proven territory, or a marketing channel you have already tested and measured. An expense that sustains revenue might be the maintenance contract on the equipment your production depends upon, or the training that keeps your team sharp and your service consistent.
And if an expense cannot honestly claim a home in any of the three buckets? Then it is not an investment at all. It is simply money leaking out of your business because the account balance made you feel expansive.
The Third Bucket Is Where Smart Owners Get Sloppy
Now, here is the tricky part.
That third bucket — building for the future — is where I see the most money wasted, precisely because it sounds so noble.
“We are investing in the future” is a sentence that ends conversations. Nobody questions it. It carries the ring of vision and leadership.
Yet if you are spending money to build something new — a product line, a service offering, a new market — those dollars are not ordinary expenses. They are investments. And investments demand a level of rigor that ordinary spending does not.
You must be able to answer these questions, in writing, before the first dollar moves:
- What new revenue stream, exactly, are you building?
- How long will it take to build?
- What are the short-term and medium-term milestones along the way?
- How will you define success when it is done?
- And the question most owners avoid — at what point will you admit it is not working, and stop?
If you cannot answer these, you are not investing. You are hoping. And hope, as warm as it feels, is not a strategy that survives contact with a bank statement.
Treat It Like a Project, Because It Is One
Here is the discipline I recommend to our clients.
Any spending aimed at future growth gets treated as a formal project. It receives a defined outcome. It receives milestones. It receives Key Performance Indicators that get reviewed monthly — not glanced at, reviewed — so you can see whether reality is matching the plan.
This does two beautiful things.
First, it forces clarity before the spending starts, when clarity is cheap. Second, it gives you permission to course-correct early, when corrections are still small and affordable.
Without this structure, you will simply spend, month after month, hoping for an outcome you never even defined. And a year later you will look at your financial statements and wonder where the profit went.
Lean Is Not Fear. Lean Is Wisdom.
Alternatively — and this is a perfectly honourable path — you can choose not to expand at all.
Keep your fixed costs very lean. Examine carefully whether you truly need to spend more right now. Do not let the presence of money create the need to spend it.
The rain will come again. It always does. Not because I am a pessimist, but because I have read enough history and lived enough decades to know that turbulence is the normal condition of business, not the exception.
The owners who thrive across decades are the ones who stay lean in the sunshine, so the storms find them prepared rather than exposed.
Remember Why You Went Into Business
Let me close with something deeper than tactics.
Why did you go into business in the first place?
Strip away everything else, and I believe it comes down to three things, and only three things:
- Freedom of time.
- Cash-flow.
- A balanced lifestyle.
That surplus cash sitting in your account after a strong year is not merely fuel for expansion. It can also be invested in the very things you started the business to attain — your family, your health, your time, your life beyond the office walls.
There is no rule that says every good year must be converted into a bigger, more complicated business. Some of it can simply be converted into a better life. That, too, is a return on investment.
The Bottom Line
When money is flowing, keep your expenses tight, and invest the difference.
If you choose to use the surplus to grow, be very cautious about where it goes. Define the outcome. Set the milestones. Attach the KPIs. Treat it as the project it truly is.
Do that, and the good years will fund the great ones.
Skip it, and you will discover — as many have before you — that nothing evaporates faster than a profitable year spent without a plan.
Thanks for reading…
