Mine Your Biz

Many years ago (I think over 15) my company paid a very well known company to conduct a seminar for all the managers on effective time management. We all got the planner the company sold and then we were trained on how to more effectively prioritize our day to get more done. They must have come up with a fairly effective tool, because I just visited their website and the planner looks very similar.

These days, of course there are smart phones, tablets, and software to help us stay organized as well as the old pen and paper style planners, but I must admit that I was never as efficient as I would have liked at staying organized even with the proper tools. Remember the old adage, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink? That certainly applies to me and organizational tools, I’m sorry to say.

I recently read Using ‘Getting Things Done’ to Make Your Business More Efficient that questioned some of the techniques I had tried in the past and brought up some new ideas (at least for me). Here are the recommended tips.

• Get everything out of your head.
• Don’t use your email inbox as a “to-do” list.
• Make to-do items action-oriented.
• Use you calendar only for scheduled events.
• Build in review periods.

As I reviewed the tips and examples of the techniques, I noticed that I was guilty of doing most of the not-to-do tips and not doing any of the to-do tips (imagine that). I recently acquired a very long term, complicated project from a co-worker so I was especially interested in the Build in review periods. I think it will really help me stay focused on  progress on the project as opposed to “just floating with the current” as described in the article. I’m afraid I have sometimes been guilty of that in the past and I think this tip should help.

Springtime is finally here, although her in St. Louis and many parts of the country we certainly didn’t have much of a winter. The days are getting longer, flowers are in bloom, baseball season has started -  life is good. So according to 6 Tips for Organizing Your Small Business Finances:

“Now is the perfect time to take a spring cleaning approach to the business issues that often get put off.”

That is not the first thing I would normally consider to do in the spring, but the article does make a few good points for doing exactly that. The tax season is still fresh in your mind (probably painfully so) so you remember some of the tax strategies you used last year that did or didn’t work and it is still early enough in the year to implement new strategies. The article gives these six tips to consider for your business finances.

1. Talk to a CPA
2. Re-evaluate Your Business Entity
3. Review Estimated Tax Payments for 2012
4. Separate Business and Personal Finances
5. Use a Cloud App to Get Organized
6. Don’t Forget Traditional Cleaning

I think two of the most important recommendations in the article are the second and fourth items. If your business started out as a sole proprietorship or partnership and has grown over the years it may be time for a change and the article provides some options that may save you some money in taxes as well as providing other advantages.

The article also gives some very good reasons for splitting your business and personal finances, and to do so recommends taking the actions of opening a business credit card and business checking/savings account.  These actions have many advantages and will make record keeping much easier as well.

Last but not least, don’t miss the links to some Cloud Apps you can use to make running your business much more efficient, and easier as well. I followed one of the links and found 5 Handy Apps for Small Business Finance Management. Do you dread expense reports or have problems with invoices? Then try Expensify for expense reports or FreshBooks for invoices. These apps vary in price, but FreshBooks, for example, has a thirty day free trial. What have you got to lose?

We’ve posted several times in the past on various aspects of small business owners and retirement, but it has usually been aimed at an established business where the owner is beginning to think about retirement after several years in business. It turns out that planning for retirement even as a startup is important and can even save you money over  your years in business.

I spotted Planning for retirement is important for startup owners while I was reading my local newspaper on a rainy Sunday morning. This quote from the article really got my attention.

“It might seem like a mistake to stash anything away for retirement now when your business is demanding so much cash and time. But because retirement savings plans give you a tax break upfront when you contribute money to them, you can often stretch your money further simply by using one of these plans.”

“A retirement plan is critical,” said Robert Keebler, a Green Bay, Wis., certified public accountant. “For every dollar you put away, you can save about 30 to 40 cents in taxes.”

The article then makes the point that once money is in a retirement plan, it won’t be taxed until retirement. If you put money in a bank savings account the interest will be taxed annually.

Of course, the type of retirement plan you can set up depends on your type of business. The easiest to set up is if yours is a sole proprietor with no employees, there is even a link in the article to a handy retirement calculator to see how much you can contribute. It does get more complicated if you hire employees or if the money in a 401(k) exceeds $250,000, but there is a link in the article to the Department of Labor that can give you some good advice on proper record keeping.

Last but not least, the article advises that you can’t wait until the last minute to set up a 401(k) but does provide some other options. The point is, this really is a win win situation. You’ll have a retirement plan in place so you’ll be way ahead of most of us and you will also be saving money at the same time.

It seems that people never learn from past history. I thought of the famous quote “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” by George Santayana when I read several articles on the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. (Actually I found out that this is a misquote, when I did a little research the actual quote is “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it”.) From several accounts of that night long ago, there was an issue with lifeboats and also mass confusion similar to the recent Costa Concordia disaster. It would seem prudent to me that the crew should be extremely well trained to react to any disaster.

So how do maritime disasters pertain to small businesses? How to Stop Your Business From Sinking Like the Titanic from Entrepreneur provides these five lessons you can learn from the Titanic and Costa Concordia.

1. Look where you’re going.
2. Don’t get cocky.
3. Plan for problems.
4. Don’t neglect training.
5. Worry about the important stuff.

The article describes how the best solution for your small business is to be alert for “icebergs” that can sink your business,  such as new trends in your industry and changes in the marketplace. It would obviously have been better for both ships if they had avoided the disaster in the first place, but especially in the case of the Titanic,  better planning (think more lifeboats) and better training could have probably saved a lot of lives.

The article makes the point that there was no lifeboat drill once the Titanic sailed and the crew was not trained on how to react to such a disaster. Don’t make similar mistakes with your company, use these five tips to avoid disasters that could sink your business.