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EP350 Why Profitable Businesses Still Feel Under Pressure · Profit With A Plan

• 0:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: What if your business is profitable, but it still feels tight, stressful, or unpredictable? That pressure may not be coming from a lack of sales, it may be coming from unclear numbers.
• 0:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Cash flow surprises, scattered decisions, or a business plan that looks good on paper, but never made it into daily operations.
• 0:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: On this episode of Profit with a Plan Podcast, we're talking about why profitable businesses can still feel under pressure, and what owners might often miss when they're trying to grow, plan, or simply get ahead of the next fire.
• 0:41
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You'll hear how business clarity helps owners make better decisions, why quick wins matter more than complicated plans, and what cash flow can reveal before the bigger problems show up.
• 0:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So if you've ever looked at your revenue and thought, why doesn't this feel easier yet? Yes, this conversation will help you see what might be happening underneath the surface.
• 1:09
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hey entrepreneurs, are you working too hard for too little profit? Well, welcome to Profit with a Plan Podcast, the podcast where we help business owners grow smarter, increase profitability, and build a company that's worth more, whether you plan to keep it or sell it.
• 1:25
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm Marcia Reiner, business growth strategist and Profit Booster behind Infinite Profit.
• 1:31
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Each week, we bring practical strategies, expert insights, and real-world steps to help you grow revenue, improve margins, and build a stronger business.
• 1:43
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Today's episode is brought to you by Infinite Profit, where strategy turns into profitable growth.
• 1:50
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And before we jump in, I've got something special for you. If you've ever plateaued, or you just find your marketing is not producing the results it should.
• 1:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I encourage you to go get the free Profit Booster Growth Map. In just a couple of minutes, it will help you identify where to bring in more qualified clients, and where your profit leaks might be costing you more money.
• 2:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You can go get yours after the show at ProfitBooster.biz. And by the way, there's no sales call required.
• 2:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Now let's get into today's conversation.
• 2:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: My guest today is Paul Sweeney. Paul is a chartered accountant and business advisor with more than 30 years of hand-on experience helping small to medium-sized business owners help make better decisions, improve cash flow, and create more clarity inside of their company.
• 2:41
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: He has the gift for taking complicated financial and planning pieces of business and explaining them in plain English, so that the owners can stop guessing, start reacting, and start seeing what really is happening behind those numbers.
• 2:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Paul is also the host of Behind Your Business, or the Business Behind Your Business podcast, where he shares practical, real-world conversations that help owners build stronger businesses with fewer surprises. Now, that's what we all need. Fewer surprises. Paul, welcome to Profit with a Plan Podcast. Thanks for coming on.
• 3:19
  Paul Sweeney: Thanks, Marcia. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here, and I'm really looking forward to unpacking this with you today.
• 3:24
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Oh, me too, me too. Okay, so, you know, when we talk about business planning, or we talk about financial things, people start to yawn and tap off, but this isn't that kind of conversation. We're talking about kind of the wrapper that wraps around that, so it makes it a lot easier, right?
• 3:41
  Paul Sweeney: Oh, absolutely. I think, you know, if I mention the word business planning, it's at a party. It's guaranteed to part the waves, and people will just run. And that's not the kind of thing we're talking about, that I want to talk about today, because really, you know, that phrase, it's got some really bad vibes attached to it. People just want to run. It's probably the fastest way for me to clear the room, other than talking about taxation.
• 4:05
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Oh my gosh, isn't that the truth? Coming from a financial planner in my previous life, yes.
• 4:10
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right up there with, when you're sitting on an airplane, and someone asks, what do you do? And you say, I sell insurance, and they immediately turn away from you. It's… it's… because I think it's something that has to be done, that's really boring, people don't do it, they build out this long thing, and then it sits somewhere in the corner, and they never look at it again until someone reminds them that they gotta do it again next year.
• 4:32
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And that's really sad for me. I'm a firm believer that a business plan ought to be a living, breathing document that you work off of and create the company and the goals that you really want out of it, and it's kind of that roadmap.
• 4:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But yeah, that's just me, someone who likes financial plans.
• 4:55
  Paul Sweeney: Look, I love financial plans, I love business planning, and I love the detail, because that's the accountant in me coming out. But when we think about those long plans, and everybody… when we mention business plan, people are thinking that 40- to 50, 60-page document that goes into a lot of detail about…
• 5:10
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Tons of dreams.
• 5:12
  Paul Sweeney: Tons of dreams. Competitor analysis, market analysis, why we're going to be super.
• 5:16
  Paul Sweeney: When we think about it, we've spent all of that time
• 5:20
  Paul Sweeney: Creating a large document to persuade somebody else
• 5:25
  Paul Sweeney: That you are worthwhile, that you're worth lending money to, worth investing in, that you're going to be successful.
• 5:33
  Paul Sweeney: And that's the big problem with that. You spend a lot of time getting that point to persuade somebody. And I've never seen a business plan submitted to a bank
• 5:41
  Paul Sweeney: That isn't overly optimistic, that isn't, sort of…
• 5:46
  Paul Sweeney: Looking at the bright, shiny side of everything.
• 5:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Isn't that the truth? And then you've got the complete and utter flip side of the other people out there that says, oh, I can put a business plan for you in one page, and I'm like.
• 5:58
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: that's a little lean for a business plan, but yeah, I get it, you know, it's kind of a bunch of useless information. But I think what happens is people go, oh, I'm… if all the planets align, you know, and this all works out, I'm gonna do this. Like you said, overly optimistic.
• 6:15
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: how do we make it user-friendly? How do we make it to real it actually does something?
• 6:20
  Paul Sweeney: Well, I think that it's really got to be a document
• 6:25
  Paul Sweeney: that captures what you are going to do, what you need to do. It's a document that gives you direction and focus. And now, you mentioned the one-page plan, and I'm actually a fan of one-page plans.
• 6:37
  Paul Sweeney: when they're done correctly. Oh, okay. And the reason… I'm a fan of the one-page plan when it's done correctly, is on one page, you have a simple guideline, a simple roadmap for your week.
• 6:50
  Paul Sweeney: It tells you your key priorities and the key actions.
• 6:54
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hang on a second, you said for the week?
• 6:56
  Paul Sweeney: For the week. Well, when you start…
• 6:58
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: plan for the week, yes, but I can't do a one-page plan for the year. It's just not enough. So, okay, I'll go with you on the week, and I love that, that you're considering a week plan. So, sorry to…
• 7:10
  Paul Sweeney: That's okay. So, so the plan is really… I'm like, look, my, my, my method is really looking at that… that 90-day sprint, which is pretty common, because in 90 days, you can do a lot. But that one-page plan, if, look, if you think about your big business plan with 40, 50 pages.
• 7:25
  Paul Sweeney: You've got a lot of goals, and a lot of priorities, and a lot of tasks. Where do you start?
• 7:31
  Paul Sweeney: But if you've got it on one page, Three things
• 7:36
  Paul Sweeney: three goals, 3 actions, you know exactly where to go. So when you turn up on Monday, when you open the doors, you walk in, you pick up your one-page plan, it's right there in front of you, you know what to focus on.
• 7:49
  Paul Sweeney: You also know what not to focus on, and that is where we get clarity, because we know exactly what we need to do, not the things that we don't need to do that
• 7:59
  Paul Sweeney: Might help us feel productive, help us move forward, and make us feel good, but they are not the ideas, they are not the tasks, they're not the actions that we need to focus on for our business right now.
• 8:12
  Paul Sweeney: So that's why we've got that one page, and the other thing with one page, I can see… put that up in my workplace, I can put it up on the fridge, or the nose board, or wherever.
• 8:23
  Paul Sweeney: But it's very clear to everybody in my organization what our goals are, and what the focus is for us. So we know that. And my team will call me out if I start going and getting distracted and trying to focus on something else that's not
• 8:40
  Paul Sweeney: The priority for us right now.
• 8:44
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Ugh.
• 8:44
  Paul Sweeney: And that… that… that focus, that clarity about what I need to do, because as a business owner, you've got millions of things to do. You've got 100 hats you're wearing. Yeah, it's not hard to come up with a to-do list with 257 items on it.
• 8:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yes.
• 8:59
  Paul Sweeney: The things that drive the business forward, the things that you need to focus on that are going to help you increase sales, increase profit, improve cash flow.
• 9:08
  Paul Sweeney: Grow your business. Have a business that you can walk away from. What are the things that you need to focus on? You know, you've got so much going on in your life, so much in your business. Three things, focus, clarity, that's how you start the week.
• 9:22
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it. You just made it so friggin' simple to be able to go, I'm taking this beast of a company, right? Because we do wear a lot of hats, especially in a younger company, or a founder-led company. We're trying to juggle things, and what happens? Something shiny starts sparkling, or a squirrel comes out on the tree, and we go chasing that.
• 9:43
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And we end up off track.
• 9:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And I love the fact that it's only 3 things.
• 9:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Now, those three things can have some legs to it, so it doesn't mean to be that they need to be completely simple, but they can have some legs to it, and then I'm actually hearing, I love that you have your team involved, but maybe the team has their 3 things that support that, and this team has their 3 things that support it, and everybody's moving towards the same…
• 10:10
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Direction.
• 10:11
  Paul Sweeney: That's right. Absolutely, and when you've got your team involved, You actually suddenly tap into.
• 10:18
  Paul Sweeney: A much bigger, more powerful picture of how your business can operate, or could operate, or maybe should be operating.
• 10:25
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So…
• 10:26
  Paul Sweeney: In part of my… the planning process, I like to involve, you know, a senior team, but in our situation, in our company, we involve the whole team. They all have input.
• 10:35
  Paul Sweeney: And I'll say, like, this is the focus, this is the goal, this is what we're trying to achieve.
• 10:40
  Paul Sweeney: come up with every idea that you think that we could use to move that needle forward. And at that point, there's no bad ideas. And we… this is part of the process that I've been using with clients for over 30 years. I've now put that process into a simple format that every business owner can follow, but how we start is we just capture all of those ideas.
• 11:00
  Paul Sweeney: No wrong ideas, all good. And then we go through those, and we do sort them into priority listings.
• 11:07
  Paul Sweeney: And we look at…
• 11:09
  Paul Sweeney: What are the things that are the most impact right now? What's going to give us the most impact towards meeting that goal?
• 11:15
  Paul Sweeney: And we might still come up with 25 items there.
• 11:18
  Paul Sweeney: But we still can't focus on 25 items.
• 11:21
  Paul Sweeney: So then we narrow it down and say, right, what are the things that are going to move the needle first? What do we need to do first?
• 11:28
  Paul Sweeney: And we'll narrow that down to 3.
• 11:30
  Paul Sweeney: But it might be a case of, well, we'd love to do that thing, we'd love to do this, we'd love to run this sales and marketing campaign.
• 11:38
  Paul Sweeney: But to do that, we're going to have to pay this consultant to come in and help us, because we don't have that skill.
• 11:44
  Paul Sweeney: But our bank balance says, hey, we don't have the funds to do that right now.
• 11:48
  Paul Sweeney: So, what's something that we can do really quickly?
• 11:52
  Paul Sweeney: to bring in cash. And it might be, we need to just look at and say, right, Monday morning, we need a new process for how we start the day in terms of cash flow, how we start the week in terms of cash flow. And this is something that I encourage people to do, is Monday morning, it's a Monday morning check-in.
• 12:10
  Paul Sweeney: you get your cash balance, you've got your list of all your expenses, you know what's going out every day of the month, because you've got… pretty much everything nowadays is on a direct debit, or a monthly or a quarterly cycle. You know all of those.
• 12:24
  Paul Sweeney: fair amount of certainty what you're going to be spending out, what's going out of your bank. You know what the starting point is.
• 12:31
  Paul Sweeney: What needs to come in?
• 12:33
  Paul Sweeney: And this is where the missing link is, particularly around cash flow.
• 12:37
  Paul Sweeney: Is that a lot of business owners get excited about doing the work, or making the sale.
• 12:42
  Paul Sweeney: A lot of them forget to invoice, and that's pretty bad.
• 12:46
  Paul Sweeney: But a lot of professionals don't invoice, they just keep doing the work, and doing the work, and forget the invoice. So you're never going to get paid, that's the starting point. So, go back and look at the work that you finished, and invoice that. But then the next slide is, you've sent the invoice to the customer, customer hasn't paid you.
• 13:02
  Paul Sweeney: So, what are you going to do about that? Okay, if you don't contact them, chances are they're going to think, oh, he's not chasing that money. I've got other bills to pay, I'm going to pay them first. You need to make a plan Monday morning, identify the customers that haven't paid you, that are overdue, or that need to pay you this week.
• 13:20
  Paul Sweeney: Ring them. Ring every single one of those. Before you do anything else this week.
• 13:25
  Paul Sweeney: Ring and chase those outstanding customers. Now, that might not be you, personally. You might delegate that to somebody else in your team, but in a small business where you're wearing all the hats, that's your first task for the week. Chase the money, get it in. Because without that cash in your bank account, you can't pay those expenses.
• 13:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You can't invest in the marketing team that you wanted, yeah.
• 13:46
  Paul Sweeney: Yeah, so that's a quick win, and I like to encourage people, on those 3 things that they're focusing on, try and bring in a quick win, which is either going to free up time, resources, or cash flow.
• 13:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And then…
• 13:58
  Paul Sweeney: That enables you to do the big things.
• 14:00
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love this. So, question, though.
• 14:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Back to the plan a little bit. Do we do this plan? Do we do it, you know, with the 25 things that we're trying to narrow down? That's a bigger planning meeting that maybe we do once a month or once a quarter.
• 14:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: to get us into the goals of what we're gonna do, and we're gonna set those things up. So we're not planning every week, right? We're… we're moving towards the…
• 14:24
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: The longer-term objective, that 90-day objective, in bite-sized pieces, right?
• 14:30
  Paul Sweeney: Yeah, we bring it down into bite-sized chunks, what we can actually manage. So, 3 things is generally the most that you can manage, and you know what?
• 14:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: When do we decide those three things, I guess, is what I'm asking.
• 14:40
  Paul Sweeney: Oh, okay, so… so once we've got that big list, then we'll go through and work out, well, what… okay, going back to our core goals, what are the three big strategies that we want? The three big things? It might be, we want to increase profit by $200,000, or we want to increase our customers by $50,000.
• 14:56
  Paul Sweeney: How are we going to do that? So, what of those 25 items
• 15:01
  Paul Sweeney: are going to match those goals. So if we've got something in that 25 items that doesn't actually align with our strategic goal.
• 15:08
  Paul Sweeney: It's… it's a good idea, but it's not what we need to focus on. So take that off that list, take it off your A list, and move that to your B list, okay?
• 15:15
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Got it.
• 15:15
  Paul Sweeney: So, I know I like to get people… I like post-it notes, because you can pick them and move them on the wall.
• 15:21
  Paul Sweeney: So, if you go to our website…
• 15:24
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: People are visuals, so yeah, that's a perfect way of doing it, is getting the board and going, okay, where's my priorities, right? And I love the priorities of a quick win. Do you get yourself a quick win every week? Is that one of the things that… one of those three that you do for the week is a quick win?
• 15:39
  Paul Sweeney: Well, ideally, the quick win should take you less than a week to do, okay? So maybe when you get to the end of that week, okay, you're still working on priority one and priority two, but you've actually knocked over that quick win because it is a quick win. You don't need a lot of effort to do that.
• 15:56
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Got it.
• 15:56
  Paul Sweeney: And some people are thinking, well, how can I do that? Well, one is that Monday cash flow check-in, where you're actually ringing, ringing people, and make that a priority, okay? So once you implement that system and you start doing it, well, you've done it. That task, that action list, that's done. Pick the next one on the list and add that into your three priorities.
• 16:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Got it.
• 16:15
  Paul Sweeney: Here's another one that I found. Now, this took less than 30 minutes to implement.
• 16:21
  Paul Sweeney: It cost $0 to implement.
• 16:24
  Paul Sweeney: Okay.
• 16:26
  Paul Sweeney: I started working with this client back in the global financial crisis, okay? Doom and gloom everywhere. The conversation instead with this client was, how do we take the opportunities here and grow?
• 16:38
  Paul Sweeney: And one of the biggest things was cash flow.
• 16:40
  Paul Sweeney: They didn't… they had these great ideas, they didn't have the cash flow to do it.
• 16:45
  Paul Sweeney: Right. But I looked at their… their accounts receivable.
• 16:49
  Paul Sweeney: They're terms. I said, what are your terms? And he said, oh, 7, I think, 14 days.
• 16:54
  Paul Sweeney: And I looked at it and said, well, on average, your customers are taking 68 days to pay you.
• 17:00
  Paul Sweeney: And I said, show me your invoices. Show me what you put on an invoice.
• 17:05
  Paul Sweeney: And they were using the standard account… or the main accounting package that small business in Australia were using at the time.
• 17:11
  Paul Sweeney: And…
• 17:12
  Paul Sweeney: it… on their default invoice, it had this term for payment due, and it said net 30 or 14 days, or something. In fact, they were saying net 30 days, even though the terms were 14.
• 17:23
  Paul Sweeney: I said to him, what does that mean?
• 17:26
  Paul Sweeney: And he says, what? What do you mean? It says net 30 days. I said, yeah.
• 17:29
  Paul Sweeney: when do I pay you as a customer? When do you want to be paid?
• 17:33
  Paul Sweeney: And I said, is it net 30 days from when you've done the work, when you send me the invoice, end of month, when I feel like paying you?
• 17:42
  Paul Sweeney: When do you want to be paid?
• 17:44
  Paul Sweeney: He says, I want to be paid on… in 14 days. I said, well, tell them.
• 17:48
  Paul Sweeney: But don't put due in 14 days. Put due on 14th of June, because that tells your customer.
• 17:56
  Paul Sweeney: They have to pay you by this date. And if they don't pay you by this date.
• 18:01
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: There's a penalty.
• 18:02
  Paul Sweeney: There's a penalty. There's a penalty, and you're gonna be getting…
• 18:05
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: break some knees. No, I'm kidding.
• 18:09
  Paul Sweeney: But within a month…
• 18:10
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah! But I think that's such an easy win that is totally missed, because they assumed that it was in the software correctly, but to make it
• 18:21
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: clear, crystal clear to your customers what you expect. Your customers ask from you to be crystal clear what they can expect. Why don't we do the same for our customers? I expect you to have, you know, pay me before, on or before June 14th.
• 18:40
  Paul Sweeney: Yep, absolutely.
• 18:41
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: There's no questions!
• 18:43
  Paul Sweeney: And within a month of that, within a month of implementing that win, that quick win that took 30 minutes to do, zero cost to implement.
• 18:52
  Paul Sweeney: their cash collection, so it took… they've gone from 68 days after the day they invoiced, from when they were getting paid, on average, on average, so some were taking longer.
• 19:03
  Paul Sweeney: Went down to 23 days within 1 month.
• 19:06
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Wow.
• 19:07
  Paul Sweeney: Now, within their 14-day terms.
• 19:09
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Wow.
• 19:11
  Paul Sweeney: And that, bringing forward that cash collection, because they've done the work, they'd already spent the money, okay? Remember, when you're providing a service or a product, you've already paid the money to buy the stock. You've already paid the money to pay your employees, to pay your services, to pay your overheads.
• 19:29
  Paul Sweeney: So.
• 19:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I was just gonna say, that money, you already spent that money.
• 19:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Not because, oh, I'm gonna go buy dinner with it, but you've already… you've already incurred expenses with that. Why are you giving a free timeline, you know, free… a free credit window to… to your customers to pay you when they did? Because that was… that was years ago. Even… even if you, like, have with your vendors, right, where, like, okay, so if I'm selling a product, right? Service, it's… it's labor, right?
• 19:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But if I'm selling a product, and I have to buy widgets from company A, put them together in mine to make mine, and then sell yours, there's a window there of me fronting money to run my business before I get paid on it. So you want to make those terms
• 20:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: as short as possible, and as reasonable as possible. Maybe you can negotiate on the vendor side as well, on… maybe you need longer terms with them because you're not getting paid over here until then, so…
• 20:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I mean, that's the balance of cash flow, right? It's managing the outs… the outflow and the incoming.
• 20:37
  Paul Sweeney: Yeah, absolutely. And the cash flow, because we're not managing it, and this is why I go back to this Monday morning check-in. Why Monday morning every week, okay? Because you've got time to act, okay? If somebody hasn't paid you by Wednesday, you can phone them up again.
• 20:52
  Paul Sweeney: Okay, and chase them.
• 20:54
  Paul Sweeney: If they haven't paid you by Friday, again, you can get on the phone and chase it up, end of the week, and make sure it happens. But if you don't do this on a regular basis, if you don't do this weekly.
• 21:04
  Paul Sweeney: Okay?
• 21:05
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: gets out of hand.
• 21:06
  Paul Sweeney: Yeah, and you're waiting, say, for your bookkeeper or your accountant to prepare your monthly reports, and I love monthly reports, but they've got a limitation here.
• 21:15
  Paul Sweeney: It's too late. You've missed 3-4 weeks. You've missed 3-4 weeks to fix that cash flow problem.
• 21:22
  Paul Sweeney: So, you need to be on top of it. You've got to be checking your cash every single week.
• 21:27
  Paul Sweeney: Because without cash, you can't pay.
• 21:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So, cash flow is so incredibly important for the vitality of a company. You know, opportunities come, and you need to be able to, like the marketing team, or like, hey, maybe my vendor has a sale on the product that I use to make mine, and I can get it if I… if I had the cash, I can get it at a cheaper price, right? So, logistically, it's… it's a much…
• 21:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's very important to have.
• 21:54
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But something you just scared me. If you're waiting on your accountant to print out the monthly report, you're too late. A lot of business owners
• 22:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: may not know how to dig into their own financials to make sure that they're tracking the right thing. How… what kind of strategy would you recommend?
• 22:12
  Paul Sweeney: Well, okay, I think the thing is, as a business owner, and I know a lot of business owners that don't know how to even open their financial accounting package, okay?
• 22:21
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That's so true.
• 22:22
  Paul Sweeney: Move on from that.
• 22:23
  Paul Sweeney: But as a business owner, I've yet to find a business owner that can't open their banking application on their phone and find out what's in their bank right now.
• 22:32
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Got it.
• 22:33
  Paul Sweeney: I'm yet to find a business owner that can't scroll through that list of transactions and know what's coming out on the direct debits every day of the week.
• 22:42
  Paul Sweeney: So…
• 22:43
  Paul Sweeney: The excuse that I'm waiting on the account, and I'm waiting on the bookkeeper, I can't log into my financials, that doesn't exist. Sorry? That excuse is invalid completely. You know how to open your bank account, you know how to read your bank balance, what's actually in there, not what's promised, what's actually in the account.
• 23:02
  Paul Sweeney: And you know what's going out. And then you can see, okay, I've got $10,000 in, I've got to pay out $15,000 this week.
• 23:10
  Paul Sweeney: But I'm, you know, I should be getting 20,000, 30,000 coming in.
• 23:15
  Paul Sweeney: So why is that not happening? Get on the phone, ring it. Before you do anything else, before you chase the bright, shiny object, get your cash in.
• 23:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it, and here's an idea that just kind of came to me. If you've got a great accountant, and you've got a software, which, my goodness, you should, and you should have an accountant, that accountant can print or give you a,
• 23:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: a functionality inside of the software where all you do is you go in and you hit that button, and it prints out a weekly report of, you know, what's outstanding and what's not. So you can, like you said, a little bit of a 30-minute training or a little bit of a 30-minute setup can help you manage this in a way that will allow you to gather the information, so you're not trying to pull it out of your memory, right? You're pulling it out of actual data
• 24:00
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: from the company, and that report can be just as easy to have the accountant set it up so it prints for you every week. Maybe it's on your desk everywhere, in your printer every Monday morning when you come in, right?
• 24:12
  Paul Sweeney: Yeah, it should be. But I'm going to put a little warning sign there on those accounts, okay? And this is a warning sign, because I see this happen a lot with small business owners, particularly the ones that like to do their bookkeeping themselves.
• 24:24
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Oh, no.
• 24:25
  Paul Sweeney: Okay.
• 24:27
  Paul Sweeney: Is it accurate? Is it complete?
• 24:31
  Paul Sweeney: And is it, you know, is it the truth, okay?
• 24:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Well, and I think.
• 24:35
  Paul Sweeney: in it.
• 24:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Paul, that's a whole other conversation on accuracy of accounting and data, because garbage in is garbage out, so we need to… Absolutely. We'll make the assumption that the data that they're reading is accurate at this moment. Absolutely.
• 24:50
  Paul Sweeney: So, so let's… let's go back. Okay, so you've got your cash flow, okay, that's how you fund a lot of your activity, your business plan. That's how you make it happen in a lot of cases, because one of the things you've got to work out is, okay, I've put my list to 25. Let's go back to our list of 25. They're on the wall, they're in post-it notes, you can read the handwriting, because it wasn't me writing it.
• 25:11
  Paul Sweeney: You're at $25, and you might think, okay, that one is going to… I need equipment which is going to cost me $100,000, okay? Can I get finance for that? Well, the priority might be, okay, let's…
• 25:23
  Paul Sweeney: start organizing the finance, or instead, let's do a cash flow forecast so that we can work out, can we afford to pay for this equipment going forward, but also, how much more revenue is this going to generate for us? So it might be a case of, before we actually go and commit to buying it, we need to work out
• 25:42
  Paul Sweeney: Should we? Okay, so that's the first decision, okay? And sometimes we'll have, in our list, we might have 25 items, but we might have 4 of them, which they follow consecutively in order, okay? For number 4 to happen, number 1 has to happen first, and then 2 and 3. So we can't start with number 4.
• 26:02
  Paul Sweeney: And sometimes people try to do that, which doesn't make sense, but…
• 26:05
  Paul Sweeney: So we need to identify what has to happen first. So those ones, we can't start them, so we park them. We park them, okay? And I've got a… I've got a nice little spreadsheet tool to help
• 26:15
  Paul Sweeney: organize our thoughts. So, once we've got all these post-it notes, what do you do with them? Well, you collate them into a nice, easily manageable format where, okay, it's easy to see what's the next one on the list after you've completed, okay?
• 26:29
  Paul Sweeney: I love it. But going back to it, so identify what's it going to take to implement it, and we might be working to this. And this is why our initial plan is working on the next 3 months, okay?
• 26:39
  Paul Sweeney: Next 3 months, so we've got 3 items, hopefully a quick win, which we can knock over very quickly, and then put something else into our plan, okay? But we're reviewing it weekly as well.
• 26:48
  Paul Sweeney: So we have a little weekly check-in with our team.
• 26:50
  Paul Sweeney: And say, where are we on track? Okay, Joe, you were looking at doing a cash flow forecast to help us work out whether we can afford this new piece of equipment, and also.
• 27:01
  Paul Sweeney: What's the saving it's going to be in terms of production costs?
• 27:05
  Paul Sweeney: you know, can we afford it? Where are we up to on the cash flow forecast? And Joe will go, well, you gave me all this other stuff to do, so I haven't got around to it. And at that point, you say, right, Joe, what's that other stuff?
• 27:15
  Paul Sweeney: And he goes, XYZ. And I said, well, stop doing XYZ. This is your priority for the next 4 hours, okay? Go away and do that, because we need that to be able to go forward with our plan.
• 27:25
  Paul Sweeney: So give, also, your team
• 27:27
  Paul Sweeney: authority to say, I need to focus on this right now. This other… these other tasks that you've given me, they have to wait until I spend some time focusing on the priority task. So I'm very clear about what I need to do to move my business forward, to increase my profit, to improve my cash flow, to grow my business. Be very clear…
• 27:47
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm getting… I'm getting that overlaying factor of that word, clarity, that I think is so important, because, you know, we do go chasing things that aren't necessarily important for the… for right now, or we might have them in the wrong order, or the wrong priority.
• 28:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Or, like many business owners with their team, they're barking orders, and they're saying, well, stop doing that, do this now, because this is here, and you're like, wait a minute, I'm still finishing this, right? So you're giving them that authority, but it all seems to wrap around…
• 28:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Clarity, right?
• 28:21
  Paul Sweeney: Absolutely.
• 28:22
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Where are we going?
• 28:25
  Paul Sweeney: Be very clear about where we're heading, why we're heading there, and what that means we have to be doing now.
• 28:33
  Paul Sweeney: So, when you've got that clarity, it also takes away all those decisions. You come in at… and, like, sometimes I'll come in, and my…
• 28:40
  Paul Sweeney: my project management, my workflow system will come in, and it will tell me that I have 127 items on my to-do list today. And I'll go.
• 28:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You mean I'm not the only one?
• 28:51
  Paul Sweeney: That's a good day. That's a good day, because of stuff.
• 28:54
  Paul Sweeney: But what it'll say to me is, okay, of those 127, okay, yes, I've got client work to do, and that's got to be a priority, but of that list, how many of them are the items that are in our plan.
• 29:07
  Paul Sweeney: what's the thing I need to focus on? Okay, and I might have other ideas that have snuck onto my to-do list.
• 29:13
  Paul Sweeney: which are not the priority for the plan. They were ideas that we talked about, but so what I'll do is I'll take them and I'll move them into my later column, okay?
• 29:22
  Paul Sweeney: They're off my list, they're removed, so I've got less things to look at when I'm making decisions.
• 29:27
  Paul Sweeney: So, I've got my 3 key actions for the week. That's driving it, and… and the other thing is…
• 29:34
  Paul Sweeney: You've got to set aside time to do this, so your calendar becomes very important.
• 29:40
  Paul Sweeney: Book those appointments to do those things in your calendar. Don't let the busyness of your week
• 29:48
  Paul Sweeney: Fill it up so that you've got no time for them. Book in time for the calendar. And that might mean you need to get out of there. You might need to get out of your office, get away from the workplace, go somewhere where you can focus. Or maybe an hour at a time, maybe that's all you can manage, because you're too busy. We're going to work on that. That's part of the plan. We're going to free up your time.
• 30:07
  Paul Sweeney: But start with one hour. Get out of where you normally work, so you're not answering the phone, you're not being distracted by email, you're not being distracted by staff coming in and asking you questions, and why are they asking you questions all the time? You should have processes. Another story, another podcast.
• 30:22
  Paul Sweeney: But book in an appointment, and make sure you allocate time to work on those things. And when you do that, you then move the business forward. You create capacity, you get things done, but you're also very clear about, what am I doing?
• 30:35
  Paul Sweeney: when I'm there, when I'm in that one hour meeting that I've booked, how I've gone to the coffee shop, it's not a case to catch up on your social media. You know I've got one hour to work on my plan, or how I'm going to make this
• 30:48
  Paul Sweeney: You know, how am I going to design my marketing plan? What's the goal of it? What do I need to do? Who do I need to hire? Work on it there. Make that the priority. So… Oh, this is great.
• 30:58
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Because it's not just around financials, it's not just around cash flow. You happen to use it with cash flow because that's your natural lane of looking at your numbers and your data and your financials.
• 31:09
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But my goodness, you can use this methodology of getting clarity before you start to focus on things, and really using your brain map, or whatever your business plan that you have with these three things that you do each week.
• 31:24
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You could do this in every single facet of your business.
• 31:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Whether it's the accounting team does this, whether it's the C-suite that's making decisions doing this, whether it's the customer service, or the development team, or the marketing, or the sales team, it's just… I'm seeing this process.
• 31:47
  Paul Sweeney: Oh, absolutely.
• 31:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: readily duplicatable.
• 31:51
  Paul Sweeney: Yeah, absolutely. It's a replicatable process, repeatable process, and it's simple. And the reason it's simple is so that you can do it, okay? We don't want that 40-50 page plan that's trying to persuade somebody else to do something for you. We want a simple, clear, focused plan
• 32:09
  Paul Sweeney: Helping you make decisions about where I'm spending my time right now, what I need to focus on, also what my team needs to focus on, but also your team knows you need to focus on this because the plan is up, and it's visible to everybody.
• 32:21
  Paul Sweeney: And they know, okay, so Paul's gone, and he's working on this new service delivery that we've decided we need to have, because the government's gone and changed the rules. How are we going to implement it?
• 32:32
  Paul Sweeney: That's a priority, because that's going to lead to more revenue for us. So, while Paul's working on that, we're not going to interrupt him with, admin calls, or what do we do with this client, or chase the thing. We know he's working on that. So, but we also know he's blocked out that time in his calendar. When he comes back, then we'll ask him the questions. But being very clear…
• 32:51
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: They know their process.
• 32:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: They know their process that's going to support what you're doing, because everybody, it's… it's… it's got legs, and everybody has their jobs in pieces with it, and so I really, I really like that. All right. Paul, we can go on about this for a long time, and talk about different areas to really improve in, and like I said, this process…
• 33:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: This framework can be used in any section within your company, whether it's the big pieces or the little departmental pieces. The same process works well with it. So where can listeners find out more about you, how they can do this process and really start to get their cash flow going in the right way?
• 33:31
  Paul Sweeney: Absolutely. The easiest way to find me is to search for Paul Sweeney Accountant, okay? And that'll take you straight to my website, where there'll be links to the course, where I've actually created and put this methodology into a simple, repeatable framework for you as a business owner.
• 33:49
  Paul Sweeney: to use every day, with your team, make things happen, but it's a simple, repeatable framework for you to use. It's the same process I've been using for over 30 years with all my clients, and it works.
• 34:00
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Amazing.
• 34:01
  Paul Sweeney: It works. We get great results, clarity, focus, and achieving that results. Better profit, better cash flow, better sales, better lifestyle. Better, better, better freedom.
• 34:11
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it. What we all… what we all got into business for, which was the lifestyle. Little did we know we opened this gigantic can of worms. Absolutely. Exactly. So, Paul, repeat your website again, where they can find this?
• 34:24
  Paul Sweeney: Okay, so if they search for Paul Sweeney Accountant, okay, and if you get to .com.au, but yeah, Paul Sweeney Accountant, you'll see the information on that course, or the Business Planning Operating System, as I call it. You'll also see resources in terms of how you can improve your cash flow, how can you improve your operations, links to my podcast where I interview other guests to help you. I'm bringing in the
• 34:48
  Paul Sweeney: the board of advisors for you, the experts from everywhere that you don't have access to, but I'm bringing them and making them accessible to you every week. I love that. I love part of that. That's one of the things that really excites me, is helping people
• 35:01
  Paul Sweeney: You know, get the skills to grow their business.
• 35:04
  Paul Sweeney: get the knowledge from people that have been in the field working, helping business owners, not just AI, not just Google, but real people with real results, helping real people running real businesses. I love it, and yeah, so keep going. Paul Sweeney accountant, that's where all the resources are to help you with your business.
• 35:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Love it. Thank you, Paul. Thank you so much. And thank you, listeners, for tuning in today. I hope you're walking away with a couple of practical ideas that you can put to work right now to grow more profit and a more valuable business. And I know that having this simple one-page plan that you can work off of
• 35:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: that starts to get the momentum going, right? You're taking that first step, and you're starting to get those little
• 35:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: quick wins, and then you're starting to build the framework that's actually going to help you achieve the step, rather than looking at this long plan going, where do I go? So, I love that you're… you're using this, Paul, and you've shared it with us in a way that totally makes sense and makes it easy for us. So, thank you. Thank you.
• 36:09
  Paul Sweeney: You're welcome.
• 36:10
  Paul Sweeney: Absolute pleasure.
• 36:11
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, and before we go, if you want a clearer path to more revenue and stronger profit, go grab your free Profit Booster Growth Map.
• 36:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It'll quickly show you the top opportunities, similar to Paul's, but no way comparable. But it'll show you where those top opportunities are to grow your revenue and stop those profit leaks that may be holding your business back.
• 36:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You can go get it anytime, or more particularly after the show, at ProfitBooster.biz, B-I-Z.
• 36:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And if this episode gave you value, be sure to subscribe and share it with other business owners who may need to hear it.
• 36:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And I'll see you on next week's show with more strategies to help you grow smarter and a more profitable business. So until then, make your plans and profit with them. Thanks again, Paul.
• 36:59
  Paul Sweeney: Thank you.