As a small business, micro-business or self -employed person right now, there is one person you should be talking to, because they can almost certainly help you to get through this situation.
Your accountant.
There’s far more to them than year-end accounts or tax returns.
Give them a call.
Kudos to all those accountants out there who are already showing what they are made of.
Professional gardeners often advise on how to buy the best trees. Choose something healthy and bushy, with plenty of growth potential. Choose a plant that’s actually in flower – that way you know it will look as you want. Check the roots to see if they are vibrant. All good.
It’s the advice that follows that’s harder to take: Take off any flowers or fruit. Trim back the branches. Trim the roots. Keep it weed-free, feed it regularly and prune it carefully until it’s mature.
The idea behind this is that a) the plant is more able to cope with the shock of being moved from pot to garden and b) by sacrificing growth now, we get more, better growth later, and a much better contribution to the garden. Given the right treatment at the start, and the right kind of nurturing as it grows, a tree will embed itself beautifully into its garden and last for years. It will scale. Then it will more or less look after itself.
You could say a business is like a tree – a money tree if you like. A focus on growth (especially rapid growth) can can undermine its health and leave it susceptible to the next hurricane that blows. Much better to spend some initial effort making it scaleable.
Then you can sit back and enjoy it.
Last week I heard of some interesting research about consumers. Which is that people don’t like to be thought of as consumers.
They want to be participants. They don’t want to be one side of a transaction, they want to be pulled into a dance; enrolled on a journey. They want to connect and create a bond between themselves and the people they buy from.
That’s good news for ventures like Sail Cargo Alliance, who are in the business of building communities of producers, shippers and consumers.
Even better news for accountancy firms, because that’s just the change that’s needed to build a thriving practice and a thriving community of small businesses.
Today the ICAEW is calling for accountants to rally to the cause of sustainable cost accounting: “All stakeholders have to … Read More “Measuring what really matters”
In an earlier post, I asked why it’s deemed important to report on the FTSE 100 index at every news on the radio, and what relevance that index has for most ordinary people.
There are alternative things to measure, that matter more to most people, and I think Kate Raworth’s doughnut pretty much captures them all.
What if instead of the FTSE, we had a daily snapshot of our impact as a nation on overshooting the ecological ceiling, or undershooting the social foundation? What if we could see every day how well we are doing at keeping within “the safe and just space for humanity”.
Like the FTSE and other indices, this snapshot would be made up of data from millions of enterprises large and small across the country, and that means that each enterprise would need to measure it’s own impact too.
That’s completely doable, if we set our mind to it, with the help and support of our accountants.
Why wait? Let’s start now.
For the last 260 years or so we’ve behaved as if we live in a world of infinite physical resources. We don’t, obviously.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean a ‘no-growth’ future. It just means finding a different, less damaging kind of growth.
If the things people really want, beyond food, shelter and family are agency, mastery, autonomy, purpose and community – personal growth and development – then we will never run out of opportunities to grow these things, just as we will never run out of opportunities to ensure everyone is fed, sheltered and cared for properly.
Plenty of scope for human ingenuity I would have thought.
Wikipedia tells me that “an externality is a cost or benefit that affects a third party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit.”
If I have a flu jab, to protect myself from flu. I decrease the chances of the people around me catching flu. That’s a benefit.
If I go to work full of cold, I increase the chances of my colleagues getting a cold, that’s a cost. If I stay at home, that’s a benefit.
The point about externalities is that they aren’t measured. They are literally not accounted for in a business. We metaphorically shrug our shoulders and say “Not my problem. I’m just trying to make a profit.”
Yet the consequences don’t go away, just because we ignore them. If I go to work with a cold, and my colleagues catch it, everyone’s productivity is lowered.
We live in a series of systems, and ultimately a closed system – planet Earth, and sooner or later the consequences will come back to bite us.
Time then to take responsibility for all the results of our actions, not just those we choose to see.
Every day, every news programme reports the level of the FTSE 100. Here’s a question (actually three): What does the … Read More “Measuring what matters”
Professor Richard Murphy has sparked controversy (again) this morning with his AccountingWEB article: Do you recognise your own accounts?
In it he suggests that companies of all sizes consider their published accounts as part of their marketing, and own them in the same way they would any other part of their marketing collateral.
I agree. Your promise isn’t just superficial fluff, it’s the essence of who you are and the change you seek to make in the world. It should be reflected in everything you do, even the parts many people don’t see.
How you do one thing is how you do everything. Dissonance undermines trust.
Reflection is an excellent start for clarifying who your ‘ideal clients’ are. By getting under your own skin to discover your values and preferred behaviours, you’ll uncover some of the values and preferred behaviours of the clients you like to work with, and who like to work with you.
This enables you to take the next step – putting yourself in your client’s shoes and seeing what you do from their perspective.
This will move your thinking from ‘features’ (“we produce accurate accounting information”), to ‘benefits’ (“we make sure you have the information you need to run your business well”).
If you already have clients who love you, you can even ask them why they do, and this will uncover benefits you didn’t even know you delivered (“you listen to me”,”you really get to know me and my business”, “you find me suppliers I can trust”).
The next step is to get to the core of the relationship you create with your clients over time, and for that there is one key question:
Who do you help them to become?
Because all business is about transformation – even accountancy.