We’re not trained to ask for help. We’re meant to be knowledgeable enough and competent enough to manage everything ourselves. We like to present as swans, serene on top, paddling madly underneath.
Independence is overrated.
Sometimes the quickest and best solution is to ask for help. And your accountant can be a good place to start.
Money. A means of exchange, and a store of value.
As one, it oils the wheels of commerce, industry and everyday life. Enabling us not just to transfer value between each other, but to generate new value for each other.
As the other, it locks up not just its current value, but also all the potential value it is able to create.
Too much oil in the system can be wasteful, but not enough is catastrophic.
Hoarding is counter-productive. Money needs to move to be really useful, and the more parts it can reach, the more useful it will be.
The thing my mum hated most about her role in our family was that she was the one who nagged us. To tidy our rooms, do our homework or put our clothes in for washing.
Because, as all grown-ups know, getting things in good order doesn’t happen by accident. There is no ‘housework fairy’ that does it all by magic.
There isn’t a book-keeping fairy either. Although many small business owners seem to think there is. There’s only your poor accountant trying to drag the information out of you in time for the deadline, or ploughing through that jumbled bag of receipts you’ve handed in, trying to make sense of them for your tax return.
One of the best things my mum did for us was to go on strike. It helped us grow up and take responsibility for keeping our own order.
Perhaps its time accountants did the same. Because keeping your business in order is far more important than housework. It’s the foundation for growing up.
This man looks like the stereotypical accountant. Formal, old-fashioned, perhaps a bit uncomfortable with people.
Except he is actually one half of the first team to conquer Everest. Tenzing Norgay. Who partnered Edmund Hillary to achieve his dream.
If Mr Tenzing can look like an accountant, perhaps it’s time to revise your view of your accountant. Who knows, they may just be the partner you’ve been looking for to help you achieve your dreams.
There’ll certainly be more to him or her than meets the eye.
PS I’ll be giving a short talk on “How to get the most out of your business accountant” on the 26th September at the Metro Bank in Bexleyheath.
This is a breakfast networking event that runs from 8am to 9.30am and is free to attend.
To book your place, RSVP to jo*******@***********lc.uk
Yesterday, I drove across the Peak District, along the Derwent Valley and up through Glossop to Calderdale.
Almost the whole way, wherever there was a river below, the valley was thick with old mill buildings, built to last. Some famous, like Arkwright’s Cromford and Masson Mills, now world heritage sites. Most forgotten, derelict, or hidden in the core of industrial estates, or turned into housing.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there were well over 100 cotton mills in this area, their owners rushing to embrace the new business model pioneered by Arkwright – a factory powered by water.
Within 30 years, many of them were out of business. A new technology shift had taken place, from water power to steam, which meant independence from rivers, and freedom from the size constraints imposed by valleys. Small factory owners, unable to justify the investment could no longer compete and went under.
Now of course, very little cotton is spun or woven in the UK. Yet more technology shifts meant that even large factories drifted slowly into obsolescence.
To us now, this is history. But technology is always shifting, increasingly in people-based service industries like accounting, consulting and law.
You can embrace the latest business model, or make a virtue of keeping to the old. The trick is to do it consciously, keeping an eye out for whats next.
“It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.” Dieter Rams Design Principle number 7.
When a service process captures the ‘what has to happen’ without getting too bogged down in the ‘how it happens now’, it lasts. It stays meaningful, and as a result stays useful, and used.
This is possible because human beings are very good at grasping an overall structure, and very good at flexing themselves around it to deal with a specific situation.
So let them. In a service business, variation is information.
I found this on the Corporate Accountability Network‘s site the other day: “The Corporate Accountability Network thinks that every company, … Read More “Stakeholders”
Most of us business owners are driven by our needs – for autonomy, for self-expression, success, money or even revenge. That doesn’t often build a business that lasts, except by chance.
The promise you make can’t be for everyone. ‘Everyone’, or their close relation ‘anyone’, turns you into a commodity – interchangeable with every competitor in your field, putting all of you in a race to the bottom on price.
And before you work out what your promise really is, you need to work out who it’s for.
There is a community of people who need what you can offer. They are underserved by what’s out there, looking for a change that you can help them to make. They want to become something or someone different, and don’t know how to do it.
As long as there are enough of them, (and enough is less than you think), these people are your market, and by putting them in the driving seat, you’ll start to build a business that lasts.
It’s never about us, it’s about the people we serve.
“No taxation without representation!”
We’re all familar with the demand that triggered the American war of independence.
Colonists felt it was deeply unfair that they should have no say on how they were governed from afar, but still had to pay duties on luxury goods received via that far-off government.
Nowadays there are those who would like to flip this idea around, claiming that those who pay ‘no tax’ should not be represented in government.
This is based on misinformation of course, ‘no tax’ in this case means ‘no income tax’. People who are not eligible to pay income tax still pay national insurance, VAT, fuel duty, tobacco and alcohol duties, car tax, insurance tax, and these taxes often represent a significant proportion of their income.
What those suggesting “No representation without taxation” are really saying is “You don’t count.”
Tax is far too important to merely avoid. Time to think differently about it, before it’s too late.
The great thing about having a simple and straightforward way of knowing how much work-time goes into a process, is that if you also know the total amount of work-time available to you, you can easily work out how much spare capacity you have. Or not.
Even better, you can work out exactly how many more instances of a process you can run with that spare capacity. So you can target your sales process at getting the most bang for your buck.
Happy days!