If you’re a business owner, then you know that your success or failure all comes down to one thing: cashflow. Are you wondering how you could increase your cash flow without making more sales or reducing your overhead?
We meet with business owners every single day. Those conversations revolve around three areas.
First, how to operate their business more efficiently by using the cash flow that they have.
Two, how to reinvest in their business, to grow their business so that they can have a better future.
Or three, how can they utilize their business, and the cash flow from their business, to enhance their personal lifestyle and meet their family obligations?
Let’s face it, if you got into business on your own, you did it to become financially free. But whether you’re trying to expand your business, maintain your business or increase your lifestyle, it all comes down to one common denominator, and that is how you’re using your cash flow. You see, we discovered over 20 years ago that it’s not what you buy, it’s how you pay for it. It’s how you use your cash flow that determines the success of controlling your cash flow.
Here’s a simple example. Most business owners don’t like debt. They think debt is bad and hate having that weight on their plate. So they’ll accelerate their debt payments and get that debt off their balance sheet as quickly as possible. But what they don’t realize is that by giving up that cash flow every single month to that outside entity, it’s leaving you in less control and less financially stable position.
Think of it this way if you had one extra dollar at the end of the month, that dollar represents profit that you earned during that month. Now you have this dollar that you own and control or your business owns and controls. You make the decision because you don’t like debt, to take that dollar and throw it on one of your loan balances before you pay down that debt.
You owned and controlled a dollar, after you paid down that debt, the bank owns and controls that dollar. It’s your dollar and you willingly gave it to somebody else under the premise that it was advancing your financial position.
So here’s the kicker. By making that financial move, your net worth did not change at all. All that you did was transfer control of that $1 from you to an outside entity. So the question is, did it really move forward or did it just feel good?
So let’s go back to our original question.
How can you increase cash flow without having to increase revenue or without having to reduce expenses?
Well, it’s really simple. You make your money more efficient by making sure every dollar you use is leading you to financial freedom instead of advancing those other guys, the credit cards, the banks and the outside financiers, we take a step back and look through this lens of control. And we say, “Will this move leave you in more control of your money or will it give away control to an outside entity?” And when you look at it from this frame, the decisions are so much more clear.
The first step in increasing your cash flow as a business owner often comes down to a simple move, like refinancing your debt and extending the amortization schedule. What that’s going to do is free up cash flow every single month. Yes, it will pay down your debt at a slower pace, but you’ll have cash flow to save and build a pool of cash that you own and control and have access to while still earning continuous compound interest on that money, even when you access it to do things like grow your business or finance your lifestyle.
When we sit down with business owners, we’ll have a general discussion about how they’re actually utilizing their cash flow, how they’re using their money. And we think how they’re using their money is much, much more important than where their money actually resides. And the reason is, is because that generally creates patterns of profits or cyclical cash flow versus times where there’s no cash flow.
Once we have a good understanding of how the business owner is using their money, it’s easy to make some simple shifts that make their money more efficient and have it working for them to leave them in a stronger financial position from a cash flow perspective for their business and their family.
Just by making their money more efficient, by understanding how they’re using their money and making small adjustments to how they’re actually using their money. They don’t have to increase sales, which usually cost money, or reduce expenses which usually reduces services. We could increase their cash flow without increasing sales and without reducing expenses, and that’s the value that we can bring to any business.
If you’d like us to take a look at your business’s cash flow, feel free to visit our website at Tier1Capital.com to schedule your free strategy session today. We’d be happy to take a look.
Also, if you’d like to see exactly how we use this process for families and businesses, check out our free webinar, The Four Steps to Financial Freedom, found right on our website.
And remember, it’s not how much money you make. It’s how much money you keep that really matters.
