“If you’re going to build a business that is scalable and valuable, you must get your financial house in order.” - Jeffrey Scott

A few months ago fellow business coach, Jeffrey Scott, published an article on the Top 10 Financial Mistakes he sees business owners make. In it he shared that before taking on a new client he asks them to rate their financial involvement. I’d love to ask you the same.

How would you rate yourself in regards to your finances? 

Level 5. Review financial reports monthly and operational reports weekly, and other operational numbers daily, making key decisions along the way.

Level 4. Review financial reports monthly, making many decisions monthly.

Level 3. Look briefly at reports monthly (or every other month), making just a few decisions.

Level 2. Look at reports quarterly at best.

Level 1. Wait till year end to see how I did.

No matter where you are on the scale - you are not alone and there is always room for growth. Knowing your numbers will help you i...

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” -  Henry Ford

You didn’t go to school to become a bookkeeper or accountant and that’s not why you started your landscaping business. Yet here you are, a business owner, who needs to suddenly understand business finance.

Did you know most landscape companies fail because the owners don’t understand their numbers? It’s frustrating when you don’t know where to start and it’s normal to feel frustrated and intimidated by it. 

It’s your accountant/bookkeeper’s job to record data and relay it to you - but not necessarily to help you understand the numbers and make decisions based on them. This is where we come in. We know the numbers for our industry and what they should reflect, as well as the impact changes to the numbers will mean for the business.

Allowing us to help you with the financials takes away a lot of the stress of running the company. Through the Network we'll come alongside yo...

Blog - part 2

Welcome back to the conversation with Ryan from Mountview Landscaping. We received such great feedback last week about this interview style blog post so if there is an area of your business that you’ve worked on we would love to hear from you. We can all learn from each other. 

Last week we covered the different things that Mountview tracks and how they track them. You can read that blog post here. 

Here’s part two from our interview with Ryan of Mountview Landscaping:

Why did you choose to measure these particular things?

So I can sleep!  Honestly it relieved so much stress. I like to be able to plan, know whats going to happen, have an idea what we need to do or change. If we wait till the end of the year it's too late. 

Measuring is a predictive tool that allows you to predict if you will make money but tracking also helps us when we are quoting on jobs. Let’s say a potential client told us they needed us to drop this quote by 10% - knowing the numbers allows ...

Do you have a budget that you work from and review on a monthly basis? More often than not when I talk to business owners the answer to this is no, and though I have gotten used to this response it is not something we should be okay with. We simply cannot build successful business on hard work and hope - we need a budget.

When we started working with Mountview Landscaping I asked Ryan about their budget, like I always do, and was pleasantly surprised to hear that they have a budget and methods of tracking to ensure they are meeting that budget.

We interviewed him recently and Ryan agreed to share his insight with all of you. Here is part 1 of 2 posts from that interview:

What do you currently measure on a weekly, monthly and annual basis and why?

During the winter we track maintenance hours for snow, additional job hours from snow events, salt and icemelt product use on a weekly basis. This translates to lawn maintenance contracts during the summer season.  

We have people on a fi...

When do I need to hire someone to help with my books?

Who do I hire?

Do I need a book keeper, a controller, both?

You’re not alone in the questions you are asking yourself - This is one of the most common questions I get asked when we host our BOOST events. We want to ensure we are always giving you the best information, so we reached out to a friend who specializes in finance, Nathan (@southbrookconsulting), and he gave us a tonne of incredible information to share with you.

First up is hiring a bookkeeper, or as Nathan recommends calling them, an Accounting Associate. Traditionally this is someone who takes care of AR/ AP, invoicing, payroll, wsib, quickbooks, creating cheques and recording everything that comes in. Most are not accountants, will also do administration and are the 1st touch point for anything to related to finances in the company. 

Cost for hiring is around $18/30 per hour or $40-45,000 as salary and is for sure necessary around $1 million in sales. Nathan recom...