Business Solutions Podcast: Recent Episodes
Darren Betts, Paul Church
Welcome to the Business Solutions Podcast, where we deliver objective and practical advice to help run your business more effectively and profitably, exploring opportunities to grow revenue, reduce costs and minimise risk with your hosts, Darren Betts and Paul Church. Thank you for listening to the Business Solutions Podcast by the Founders of CPR Business Advisory. CPR Stands for Cashflow, Profit, Results. If you like our show and want to know more, schedule an appointment at cprba.com.au, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
Increasing fuel costs jack up the additional fees added to products defined by freight companies. However, many businesses need to recognize this and often find these costs sneaking in too late, failing to reflect the right price to their customers.
In this episode of the CPR Business Advisory, Darren Betts & Paul Church tackles how this happens and how to counter the inability of businesses to manage and pass on price increases.
✅ Manage your supply agreements coming out of COVID. Everyone knows that material costs started going through the roof in 2020 when import duties to freight and everything else like fuel levies. If you don't manage the internal contracts being applied to you and understand them clearly, you will not be able to pass them on to the customers. You are effectively making a potentially good revenue stream pre and post-pandemic and rely on luck to break even.
✅ Many businesses assume you can do an overall price increase of 5% or 10% across all products to all customers, and it's going to work, says Darren Betts. That's not the case. You find that you inadvertently overpriced some products, potentially underpriced some of your high-value items, and erode the margin you could be making on a high-volume thing you saw in estimates. One price does not fit all customers.
✅ The biggest margin erosion in most businesses is "you set and forget" and think everything will be fine. Companies realize late that they haven't passed on the cost to the customer; usually, it's too late by the time they do it. Where did that charge come from? Why didn't we apply that to the cost? And can we increase the price of the unit? And what does that do in the market?
✅ Paul prescribes: Be proactive and put controls in place that you can measure. Ensure that you understand how the pricing decisions happen and how departments handling sales, marketing, and finance pass it on.
Watch the new episode of CPR Business Advisory ▶️ Inability To Pass On Price Increases with Darren Betts & Paul Church.
Key points covered in this episode:
[00:13] Margin erosion & cost plus culture in review
[00:57] Monitor fuel surcharges
[02:11] Paul on surprise costs
[02:24] Managing supply agreements coming out of COVID
[03:22] Why you may be inadvertently overpricing some products
[03:57] Knowing which customers you're going to have a price increase for
[04:59] Why the old saying "Set and Forget" doesn't work
Let us help you stay on top of your costs and get your customers coming back for business. Schedule a call today: https://cprba.com.au/.
#CPRBusinessAdvisory #virtualCFOservices #cfo #accounting #finance #business #virtualcfo #entrepreneur #smallbusiness #accountant #cpa #businessowner #startup #chieffinancialofficer #accountants
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At CPR Business Advisory, we've helped entrepreneurs, businesses, and managers leverage our 60+ years of hands-on commercial experience to see their businesses differently and implement time-tested changes effectively.
Connect with us and visit https://cprba.com.au/
Many businesses will look at Cost-Plus as a necessary percentage markup on cost. This has the potential of having an overpriced product that you're trying to sell into the market, which will often lead to lower sales. This happens if you don't have a clear and accurate view of your actual build-up costs. 💸
✅ Darren Betts states that if you're applying a percentage or a markup to your material costs, you're potentially doing one of two things. 1) You're overpricing in the market, and so you're going to lose sales to competitors, or 2) You're underpriced, and therefore you're going to be eroding your margin and the bottom line on your product range.
✅ The cost-plus approach doesn't work, especially if you've got a sales team that doesn't know the difference between the markets they're going into. From a sales perspective, your sales force is just adding a percentage markup on the cost of the material landed. Since they're incentivized for sales and not the margin, they're just adding a percentage on top of the price.
✅ The downside is building up unidentified costs within your business that should be allocated and passed on. You're missing the potential OpEx needed to run the business, your rents, and your salaries. It's all those costs to come under the line that applies to the pricing structure that you're missing.
✅ Hold your salespeople accountable for your margin.
Best tip: Get your sales force incentivized or have KPIs built around your margins. Hold them accountable for preventing leaks and erosion of the overall proceeds in your business.
Watch the new episode of CPR Business Advisory ▶️ Cost Plus Culture
with Darren Betts & Paul Church
Key points covered in this episode:
[01:51] Introduction to the cost plus culture
[02:36] Two results on markups in cost structure
[03:07] Paul's client experience on pallets and PO
[04:21] Darren's sales perspective
[05:48] Why the cost-plus approach doesn't work
[06:17] Incentivizing or setting KPIs for the sales force around margins
[07:19] Look at your competitors and how they're pricing
So many businesses don't understand their break-even just to kick the doors open. They're not making any money. If you find it a hard balancing act to ensure you don't spend too much or too little for everything your business needs, let us help you stay on top of your costs and get your customers coming back for business. Schedule a call today: https://cprba.com.au/.
#CPRBusinessAdvisory #virtualCFOservices #cfo #accounting #finance #business #virtualcfo #entrepreneur #smallbusiness #accountant #cpa #businessowner #startup #chieffinancialofficer #accountants
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At CPR Business Advisory, we've helped entrepreneurs, businesses, and managers leverage our 60+ years of hands-on commercial experience to see their businesses differently and implement time-tested changes effectively.
Connect with us and visit https://cprba.com.au/
How do you address the GAP? It's the difference between what you think you should be making and what you are making in your business.
In this quick, yet powerful episode, we cite five things you should look at that creates that gap and the big erosion components on the margin of your business. 💁🏽🕳 #PreventProfitLeakage
➡️ Many business owners overlook how they incur unnecessary costs for customer acquisition. Beware of this trap: you might be spending money on marketing, but you do not understand the returns. 👥🛒
If a customer costs you $100 to bring them into a sales channel, but you're only making $20, you've got to work out all the aspects, including if they're worth selling to that customer. Be careful how you spend money on marketing, but you do not understand what the returns are. It comes back to the fact that you can only manage what you can measure.
➡️ Understand every component that goes into the actual costs to deliver your products. Overlooking the minor details in manufacturing costs contributes to a big chunk off revenues in your business. 📈
There are hidden little factors in importing, such as overseas charges, destination charges, or a high-energy charge. A few cents added to every unit increases your cost base in the long term. Make a bottom-up approach and learn to understand every component that goes into the actual cost to deliver a product.
➡️ Understanding your business model is crucial to prevent profit leakage and ensure making sound decisions in your day-to-day. Are you a high-volume, low-margin business, or are you a high-margin, low-volume business? This determines your approach. "Turnover is vanity, and profit is sanity." It's about looking at the customer mix and product mix. You can get less finance costs, pressures, and overheads and make more money when you make the right strategy changes.
➡️ Bad debt and revenue going down the drain with money you earn but don't collect. This usually comes down to poor management. Are you on top of your accounts? Are you following up on collections? If you got seven-day terms, are you making sure that your customers are meeting the seven-day terms? Are you following up with customers? If you don't call anyone, no one will pay you.
➡️ Know your gross margin and net margin and the difference between the two. Work on your break-even percentage, which considers your office, manufacturing, cost of goods, etc., to identify what you need to charge actually to make a profit. People often have profit leakage because they're undercutting themselves before they even get to the market.
Tune in to this new episode of CPR Business Advisory ▶️ 5 Ways to Prevent Profit Leakage with Darren Betts & Paul Church.
Key points covered in this episode:
[01:17] Margin erosion is something people often focus on, but they miss the details within it.
[02:42] Defining OPEX
[02:56] #1 Customer acquisition costs
[04:10] #2 Missing manufacturing costs
[07:26] #3 Bad debt and uncollected money you are earning
[08:46] #4 Not understanding your business model
[11:20] #5 Identify your break-even percentage
#CPRBusinessAdvisory #virtualCFOservices #cfo #accounting #finance #business #virtualcfo #entrepreneur #smallbusiness #accountant #cpa #businessowner #startup #chieffinancialofficer #accountants
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At CPR Business Advisory, we've helped entrepreneurs, businesses, and managers leverage our 60+ years of hands-on commercial experience to see their businesses differently and implement time-tested changes effectively.
Connect with us and visit https://cprba.com.au/
We’ve all been there.
Staying up until 2:00 AM to do one more thing. Or maybe that issue with one of your workers needs to be resolved ASAP.
Or sometimes, we just don’t know what problem we’re trying to solve.
This is why we created a quick, short survey to help you catch what’s going wrong in your business and what you can do about it.
▶️ What Keeps Business Owners up at Night? with Darren Betts and Paul Church
Key points in the episode:
✔️ Take the survey. Try it out on our website so you can finally discover the problematic areas of your business and save time and resources (and maybe give you a few more hours of sleep).
✔️ Focus on the areas that bring the best results. The questions on this survey may conjure more ideas for improvement or even make you uncomfortable about the truth. It’s important to know and face these facts head-on.
✔️ Don’t overthink it. Provide what comes first in your mind, and we’ll help you combine and analyse the data you’ve given. Don’t get lost in the noise.
Take this confidential, three-minute survey and get more sleep:
https://cprba.com.au/resources/
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At CPR Business Advisory, we've helped entrepreneurs, businesses, and managers leverage our 60+ years of hands-on commercial experience to see their businesses differently and implement time-tested changes effectively.
Welcome to the first episode of our podcast series! If you’re a business owner searching for answers, stay tuned as we tackle common problems and concerns you may have and how you can resolve them.
Today, we’ll go over the five fatal traps that your business may fall into and our advice and insights so you can resolve them as soon as possible.
▶️ 5 Fatal Traps That Successful Businesses Didn't Miss with Darren Betts & Paul Church
Key points in the episode:
✔️ Know your costs. When was the last time you knew exactly how much you were paying your supplier? You may need to update your pricing and have your price list nearby.
✔️ Consider human resources. Hire the right people for maximum profit and proper task delegation. You need to have enough time on your hands to market your business. Nip worker issues in the bud, and promote the good.
✔️ Technology is your friend. Poor processes mean poor visibility. Automate systems to control, consolidate, and encourage more efficient workflows.
✔️ Identify your market and potential. Are you putting new products into a saturated market? Are you diversifying? Focus on what makes money. Don’t compete with what others are also doing.
✔️ See where your cash is. Set your supply agreement. Be able to see how much profit you’re making. Simple monitoring can have a massive impact.
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At CPR Business Advisory, we've helped entrepreneurs, businesses, and managers leverage our 60+ years of hands-on commercial experience to see their businesses differently and implement time-tested changes effectively.
Connect with us and visit https://cprba.com.au/
WELCOME to this first new episode of the Business Solutions Podcast!
Our seasoned financial experts, Paul Church and Darren Betts sit down and share their insights from over 40 years of hands-on commercial experience working in numerous industries and businesses — from start-ups to billion-dollar companies.
They help small and big enterprises make sense of their systems, implement lasting changes, and work with businesses in distress to try and help them turn around.
Paul and Darren cover the value of training for teams. Numerous companies still haven't maximised a tool that can work wonders for onboarding strategy — new hire videos! 📹 Video is how your new talent, a majority who are Millennials and Gen Zers, can easily understand your culture, grasp your vision and feel bonded with your company faster. The most important thing is that wherever they are, they can watch the video from their location and save you so much time compared to holding inductions for every new employee.
As entrepreneurs, we understand the age-old saying "Cash is King" that, when not adhered to, has been the cause of the failures of many businesses. Do you properly manage the amount of cash in your company, and do you have the right processes to understand the liquidity of the business at any point in time?
CPR Business Advisory can remotely monitor your business's financial health and well-being.
Transformation is impossible unless people in your team are 💯% ON BOARD. They must become aware of what they need to do, why they have to do it, and how they can embrace behaviour change as an imperative to successful project implementation. You need experts to review your systems and provide the unbiased insights you need to run your business.
Glean valuable lessons in productivity improvement, cash flow management, and clear communication tips to help you establish the right culture, processes, and talent for your organisation.
Watch the full episode here ▶️
Key points covered in this episode:
✔️ Welcome to the show
✔️ Get to know CPR Business Advisory!
✔️ The value of team training and creating exciting onboard videos
✔️ A seasonal business benefits from training the workforce in groups
✔️ Why you should record meetings
✔️ On systems and reconciliations
✔️ Stop wasting time with poorly derived processes
✔️ Effectively manage the cash flow
[00:24:05] Change processes and employee resistance
✔️ Communication as a large component of time being wasted
✔️ Paul on time inefficiencies as all self-inflicted
✔️ Do you have a dysfunctional finance team?
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At CPR Business Advisory, we've helped entrepreneurs, businesses, and managers leverage our 60+ years of hands-on commercial experience to see their businesses differently and implement time-tested changes effectively.
Connect with us and visit https://cprba.com.au/