I believe it’s imperative to be invoicing and reviewing A/R & A/P reports on a weekly basis with your team. Too often I speak with business owners who have installed a lot of work but haven’t invoiced or collected on that work they have completed and are quickly becoming stuck for cash.

When you are reviewing the following weekly you will always have a clear understanding of where you sit financially and it’s a great reminder to follow up on outstanding invoices. Waiting too long to invoice, or follow-up often results in the final payment never being collected because business owners feel like it’s been too long since the job to go collect. Too many of these result in a huge amount of lost revenue and can very quickly lead to the becoming noncollectable revenue for the business.

Weekly Accounts Payable/ Receivable Checklist

• Create invoices for work completed in the last 7 days
• Create files for work to completed next week 
• Track incoming receipts per job 
• Follow up on outsta...

Have a weekly team meeting. This one piece of advice I give leadership teams every time I speak with them is also the one thing I seem to get the most push back on. Now, often this is because the meetings they are having are unstructured and therefore unproductive so the idea of doing more of them seems like a waste of time. 

Having and sticking to an agenda will add structure to your management team meeting. It’s the difference between sitting around talking about the business and having a purposeful conversation where you leave with actionable steps. 

Here are some helpful hints and tips for a successful weekly team meeting:

• Have a set agenda (topics for the agenda)
• Good news
• Company scorecards (tracking system)
• Employee and customer headlines
• IDS (identify, discuss solve) issues
• Cascading message (what do we need to communicate to the staff)
• Have a leader for the meeting
• Assign specific tasks to each person prior to ending the meeting.
• Have it at the same time each week...

Employees who feel like they are in the know at work are happier and more engaged. A lot of us have heard this before, yet most business owners still do not feel comfortable sharing the numbers and real time status updates with their staff. Jack Stack, author of The Great Game of Business, did the complete opposite and it paid off.

What did he do? He introduced a concept known as the open book management operating system. It’s a system built on sharing business and financial information with employees so that everyone is informed about the status and goals of the business and how their contribution directly impacts the company as a whole. It will completely change the way you look at business and it can really be summed up by doing 3 things:

1. EDUCATE all employees about business in straightforward and easy to understand terms using the analogy of playing a game. 
2. EMPOWER them to use that education to make business decisions
3. ENGAGE employees to drive business success by rewarding t...

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