This year if you are a restaurateur, bar or café owner, hotelier, retailer, entertainer, museum or gallery owner, tour provider or run a local attraction in Sydney, you may be able to take advantage of the Vivid Sydney Local Business Program.

For those who don’t know, Vivid Sydney is an annual festival of light, music and ideas, held in Sydney.  This year, it runs from May 28 to 18 June.

This event brings in lots of people into Sydney.  I personally have attended every Vivid since 2012 (some multiple times) and have nearly 9,000 photos or videos from Vivid over the years.  Every time I have been, the city is busy with people everywhere. 

If you join the Vivid Sydney Local Business Program you can get access to free Vivid Sydney decals and posters, your special offer or experience being promoted through the Vivid Sydney website and marketing channels and a toolkit with exclusive content and guidelines for use on your own channel.

If you think this may be of interest to your business, click here to learn more

Note applications close 31 March 2022

If you need help putting together the information required, such as cash flow please reach out to me

Contact Wayne Wanders for your FREE Business Survival Session

The NSW Government is looking for a Small Business Month Collaboration Partner 2022.

NSW Small Business Month runs from 1 to 31 March 2022.  As part of this, the NSW Government wants to partner with businesses who can host an event or series to provide business insights and tools to help NSW small businesses get back on their feet.  All under the theme ‘Rebuild, Recharge, Renew’.

The benefit to your business of hosting an event or series includes:

• promoting your business on the NSW Small Business Month website.
• leverage our NSW Government branding and social media content.
• promote your activities on your marketing channels with NSW Government branded assets .
• raising your profile in the small business community.
• connecting with hundreds of other businesses taking part.

If you want to be a NSW Small Business Month Collaboration Partner and host an event or series of events as part of NSW Small Business Month, click here to learn more information and how to apply.

If you want help to improve your your businesses chances thriving and surviving in these uncertain times contact me below.

Contact Wayne Wanders for your FREE Business Survival Session

Twice in the last week I was asked how to evaluate your marketing from a dollars and cents perspective. So today I want to share my views on this

If you want a confidential discussion on your business finances and how to evaluate your marketing, contact me below

Contact Wayne Wanders for your FREE Business Survival Session

At the end of this session, you will have multiple ideas on how your business can survive and thrive in these uncertain times.

Simply fill in the contact form below or email me at wayne@aRealCFO.com.au or call me on 0412 227 052 to organise one of these obligation free sessions.

Wayne Wanders, A Real CFO

wayne@aRealCFO.com.au

Contact Wayne Wanders for your FREE Business Survival Session

At the end of this session, you will have multiple ideas on how your business can survive and thrive in these uncertain times.

Simply fill in the contact form below or email me at wayne@aRealCFO.com.au or call me on 0412 227 052 to organise one of these obligation free sessions.

Wayne Wanders, A Real CFO

wayne@aRealCFO.com.au

The other day I spoke about growing your business profitably, is that the money, time and effort you spend to acquire a new customer, is less than the money you make from that customer.  If you are not doing this, you are growing broke.

What information do you need?

In order to determine if you are growing profitably or growing broke you need to understand the lifetime value of a customer and the acquisition costs to get that customer.

Unfortunately, I see very few accounting systems set up to provide this information.    For example, most users of small business accounting software such as Xero or MYOB, use the standard accounts to record costs.  These start at A such as accounting fees and end at W, X, Y or Z such as wages.

But this does not tell you what business activities you are actually doing.  Let’s take wages for example.  The accounting system typically has one account for wages.  But in this account, you will have the costs for:

• People selling your product and service such as sales people (acquisition costs).
• People delivering the product or service such as warehouse staff (direct cost of sales).
• People supporting your customers such as customer service or account managers (retention costs).
• People supporting the business as a whole such as the bookkeeper (overheads).

What you need to start to do is stop thinking in alphabetical order and start thinking in buckets.  What I have called my Bucket Accounting System.

How do you use my Bucket Accounting System?

Step 1

The starting point for your buckets is the core way you review your business.  This could be by product or product group, by distribution channel (for example, retail or wholesale), by geographical area or what ever way you review your business.

Or if you use multiple of these, make one a sub bucket of the other.

Then make sure all revenue and costs are recorded in the right bucket. 

If you do this for the core parts of your business, you now have in effect a profit and loss for each part of your business. 

The benefit of this is that you can now start to see where you are making (or not making) your money.  Your most profitable segments and your least profitable segments.  And it would make sense to:

• grow your most profitable segments; and,
• work out how to improve the profitability of your least profitable segments before you even consider growing them.
• Look at your least profitable segments and consider shutting these down.

Step 2

Now this mini profit and loss for each segment still does not allow you to determine if you are growing profitably or growing broke within that business segment.  Typically, I would split each of these buckets into the following sub buckets:

Customer Acquisition includes all the costs you incur to acquire a customer.  This is not just marketing but could include sales people’s salary, commissions you pay to someone for referring the customer.

Direct costs of sales includes the direct cost of selling / delivering something.  For example, you resell something, the cost of buying, storing and delivering this would go here.   If you have people delivering the service, the cost of those people delivering the service.

Customer Retention includes the costs you incur to retain a customer.  It could be customer service / care.  It could be account management.   

Overheads are all other administration and overhead costs.

Step 3

Once we have these costs in the sub buckets, we can start to calculate some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to see if the business is actually growing profitably.

Step 3a

The first KPI you want to work out is the acquisition cost per customer.  You simply add up all the acquisition costs in the bucket for the month and divide by the number of new customers for the month.

You now know what it costs you to get a customer.

Step 3b

The second KPI you want to work out is the monthly contribution by customer. 

The monthly contribution is simply monthly revenue less direct cost of sales; an appropriate share of retention costs; an appropriate share of applicable fixed costs.  And to get the monthly contribution by customer, simply divide by the total number of customers. 

Step 3c

The next KPI to understand is how long you keep your customer.  Is it for a month, six months, a year? 

Step 3d

Your next KPI is the lifetime value of a customer.  Being the monthly contribution x the number of months on average they remain a customer.

You know now what a customer is worth to you.

Step 4

Now you can use my Bucket Accounting System to work out if you are profitably growing your business.

.

If you are growing profitably, the lifetime value of your customer is more than the acquisition cost per customer.

If the acquisition cost per customer is more than the lifetime value of the customer, you are growing broke and you need to change your strategy.  Steps you can take include:

• Get more revenue from the customer each month
• Increase the time the customer stays with you
• Reduce the costs to deliver the product or service
• Reduce the costs to acquire the customer
• Do all or several of these

And that’s how my Bucket Accounting System helps you avoid growing broke and instead, grow profitably.

If you want help working out what your buckets should be, contact me below

Contact Wayne Wanders for your FREE Business Survival Session

The reality in business is, there’s a million and one ideas and ways to market and sell your business, but they are not appropriate for every business and for every business owner.  So you need to understand at the end of the day if you are doing it marketing profitably.

Cause there is no point ramping up your business if all you are doing is turbocharging the cash drain out of your business.

If you like this, why not share this with a friend, simply click on one of the icons to the left or below

If you want to see how Wayne can help you successfully navigate your way through the financial challenges to grow your business profitably faster,

Contact Wayne and arrange a free, no obligation Discovery Session.  At the end of this Discovery Session, you will have multiple ideas on how to grow your business profitably faster.

To get Wayne to help you successfully navigate your way through your financial challenges to grow your business profitably faster, simply use the contact form on the left to email Wayne or call him on 0412 227 052.

We promise to keep your email address safe.

Let Wayne Wanders, the Wealth Navigator, a fully qualified and experienced CFO, help you successfully navigate your way through your financial challenges to grow your business profitably faster.

Wayne Wanders, A Real CFO

The Wealth Navigator

wayne@aRealCFO.com.au

If you like this, why not share this with a friend, simply click on one of the icons to the left or below

Over the years many marketing people have approached me as CFO to approve some sort of marketing spend.  As you would expect a CFO does not like to spend money for no return.  Or in my words, I don’t like to approve pray and hope marketing.

So to ensure that the marketing was going to deliver a return, here are my two top tips for any marketer trying to justify to their CFO why they should spend money on marketing taken form a recent event

If you like this, why not share this with a friend, simply click on one of the icons to the left or below

If you want to see how Wayne can help you successfully navigate your way through the financial challenges to grow your business profitably faster,

Contact Wayne and arrange a free, no obligation Discovery Session.  At the end of this Discovery Session, you will have multiple ideas on how to grow your business profitably faster.

To get Wayne to help you successfully navigate your way through your financial challenges to grow your business profitably faster, simply use the contact form on the left to email Wayne or call him on 0412 227 052.

We promise to keep your email address safe.

Let Wayne Wanders, the Wealth Navigator, a fully qualified and experienced CFO, help you successfully navigate your way through your financial challenges to grow your business profitably faster

Wayne Wanders, A Real CFO

The Wealth Navigator

wayne@aRealCFO.com.au

If you like this, why not share this with a friend, simply click on one of the icons to the left or below