Finding Money Advice

Before you finalize how much money you’ll need to borrow or find from investors, let’s look at some often overlooked sources of cash flow that come with few or no strings attached. They don’t require personal guarantees, fancy business plans, or your first-born as collateral, but they may require a bit of creativity. Some will seem obvious, and some you may even be using already; but we’d feel remiss if we’d didn’t mention these practically free ways to find money.

Assuming you’re already working as hard as you can at peddling your wares, the quickest way to increase revenue is to raise your prices. Don’t lower your prices figuring you’ll make it up on volume. It’s a very dangerous strategy. If you don’t meet the new volumes, but you’ll out of business and exhausted! We list 15 other ways you can increase your top line (revenue) in the Finding Money ebook too.

Once you’ve done everything you can to boost your revenue, you’ll want to look for ways to reduce expenses with focus on those items that will reduce the ratio of expenses to sales. For example, cutting your advertising budget will reduce your expenses, but it’s likely to reduce sales too. So while you’ve lowered expenses, you may have lost a lot more in sales, and the ratio of expenses to sales will be worse. We list 40 other ideas in the ebook.

Next in your search for cash, look at how well you’re managing cash and soon-to-be-cash assets like accounts receivable. There are 25 specific recommendations in the ebook.

Inventory and payables represent significant uses of cash. Inadequate controls in these areas can cost your company a bundle in precious cash flow. We have 5 really good ideas for you in the ebook.

Properly managed accounts payable, on the other hand, can free up cash. We’ve offer 9 suggestions there.

Finally, in your quest for the ever-elusive cash, you might want to consider a wholesale change in your company’s mode of operation. Here are 20 ideas to start your creative juices going in a new direction. Yeah, some of them are obvious, but you’d be surprised how often business owners overlook the obvious. Besides, if you find one good idea that works it was worth it, right?

• Diversify. find other sources of revenue
• Focus product emphasis on cash cows
• If cash flow is very seasonal, find other products to even it out
• Offer new products to the same customers
• Offer the same products to new customers
• Offer new products to new customers
• Consider spinning off products or services
• Consider buying complementary businesses
• Consider selling limited marketing or distribution rights
• Consider franchising
• Consider selling locations
• Consider slowing your pace of growth
• Become a specialist in something (and charge accordingly)
• Don’t try to be all things to all people
• Find a market niche and concentrate your efforts
• Be on the look-out for the next business trend
• Plan at least five years into the future
• Develop strategic alliances with larger companies, customers, distributors and even competitors
• Develop joint marketing relationships with others
• Involve your employees in suggesting and implementing cash management strategies