1. Monthly Balance Statement or statement of financial position
2. Monthly Income Statement (or Profit and Loss Statement)
3. Monthly Cash Flow Statement

These 3 statements need to be reviewed on a monthly basis and within a few days of the month end to ensure you can take any action needed to either capitalize on great work or to rapidly correct operations that are underperforming before they get out of control.

ABC allows business managers to better understand product, service and customer profitability.This provides the business with better information to make value-based and therefore more effective decisions.

This final step will be the point at which you can step back from working in the business and really start to work on the business. This is the point when you will be ready for exponential growth.

Having relevant and timely income ratios will be the result of producing regular and accurate financial reports–Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash flow. The key is to have the information contained in these reports kept up to date and relevant so you can, at any time, spot any valiance in your ratios and act quickly to either correct or profit from the changes in your business.

At the end of the day, Ratios are a tool for understanding your business. And without using these tools, you may as well be flying blind.

Many years ago before I qualified as an accountant, I trained to fly Helicopters in the Royal Navy. One of the training exercises my instructor put me through was to fly into a cloud so we lost all external references, get me to pull my helmet visor down with the cover on, so I couldn’t see the instruments, and then have me to tell him what I thought he was doing with the aircraft! Even though I know the laws of physics prevented the helicopter we were flying from going upside down, I could have sworn from the feeling inside the cabin, that’s exactly what he was doing. In fact he was flying the aircraft so well that he could simulate the feeling of being inverted and without the visual inputs or access to the flight instruments I was completely taken in. Similarly with your business, if you’re not seeing the outside world and not reading the dials from your financial reports you won’t be able to tell if your business is going in the right direction.

You could be flying upside down for all you know!

I’ll take you through some real life business building examples including my recipes for creating high performing organisations and we will take a look at some the mistakes I made along the way and the lessons I learned from them.

Your vision is what will carry you through the hard times to push you to achieve the goals and the mission of your business.

We’ll also cover some common challenges in picking a revenue model and the ways you can test different revenue sources with your target customers.

We will discuss the best practices in setting up a legal entity, how you can pick a law firm to work with, how you can identify and protect your intellectual property and how you can manage regulations.

We will also cover what human resources you should have available to build a viable solution and how you can identify and engage with the human resources.

We will also cover how you can determine what roles you need at the beginning of a business, how do you determine if you need a co-founder, how do you decide what to outsource and how you can source top hiring candidates that you already know.

We will discuss the different types of investors and what they expect to see with respect to progress on team, product and traction. We’ll go over on how long it takes to raise the various funding types, how you can identify friendly investors to test your pitch on and how you will know when you are ready to fundraise.