Small Business Revolution

3Crucial Numbers

THERE IS A book that's well known to people who study success, called Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. However, an even more interesting book is The Laws of Success, by the same author.¹ In it, Hill writes that one of the success laws is “accurate thought.”

Thinking accurately sounds like a simple thing to do, but it's in fact extremely challenging. We humans are big bundles of emotions, hopes, dreams, and survival mechanisms. As a result, we all can recall times when we looked at someone else's irrational actions and wondered: What could they have been thinking?

Well, we're going to follow a process now that will allow us to look at your business with accurate thought. We'll assess how it's doing right now, rather than how we'd like it to be doing.

You may know from watching SBR episodes that pretty early in the process, the business owner will travel to our offices to meet some of our team of experts.

Amanda and other experts will have an early and critically important discussion around “the numbers,” and it's usually pretty awkward. That's the typical emotion because almost without exception, the business owner does not have a good grasp of key financial information. In fact, in some cases the owner knows next to nothing about how their business is doing financially.

Back-Pocket Accounting

If you think about the common situation with respect to what small-business owners know about their numbers, you could call it “back-pocket accounting.” They have ...