I have written before on tips to set up KPIs’ and what the critical KPIs’ maybe. However, something a colleague mentioned recently had a familiar resonance to it. He said he had worked in an organisation which circulated 141 key performance indicators’ and no one bothered to look at them! It’s important…
Managing a business isn’t easy and if you don’t know much about finance, it’s a sure-fire way of running into trouble. The first thing any entrepreneur or manager has to learn is how to understand some basic finances. Once you learn the basics, it is critical to add to your…
I have been fortunate to meet several entrepreneurs in my career. However meeting three successful ones recently and discussing how they developed their respective businesses, made me conclude that they have similar traits that make them successful. Here are my conclusions on the 3 key traits it takes to be a…
Raising funding for startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) or even large projects is still a difficult and painful process out there. I had a long discussion with an experienced consultant recently who works with tech startups and his prognosis for the smaller end of fund-raising circa £250,000 was…
One of the first things entrepreneurs get advised is to make their business tax efficient. It is a minefield for businesses and hiring a good tax adviser or accountant is paramount but here are some tips that help in ensuring that your business is tax efficient. 1. Difference between tax avoidance…
What is it? ROCE measures a company’e profitability and it’s efficiency in using it’s capital, both shareholders’ funds and borrowings. The higher the ROCE (return on capital employed), the better the performance. This is why investors like the ratio and investment analysts use it. ROCE should not be confused with…
We all make mistakes. It’s a fact of life. The key to success is how we deal with failure and overcome the negatives. Whether it’s a business startup or your business hitting a recession, failure can be painful. In business, failure can be even more difficult to deal with. Or…
How many times have you celebrated achieving goals in your business with your team? Once a year, once in two years? Or is it more? If you celebrate success more than once a year, you’re probably on the right track. We all get sucked into the daily grind and pay…
My blog on the 10 minute guide to understanding a Balance Sheet is the most read even though it is also the longest and tries to deal with some complex items in a simple way – http://bit.ly/XMTzfa I used Apple’s balance sheet for 2012 and since a year or more has…
Advice on how to start up a business has been written about almost every day and the advice follows the usual steps. 1. Come up with the business idea 2. Research the market for the product or service 3. Write your business plan along with your forecasts for the numbers…