My purpose is to provide busy small business owners with information, advise and action points to help them increase their sales, profits and cash balances.
I'm writing this blog for two reasons. First, tax law is changing at a faster pace then ever and it is getting very difficult to keep all of our clients informed on a timely basis. This platform allows me to keep in touch with our close to 700 clients.
The second reason is a little more personal. I have been working with small business owners since my first job with a CPA firm back in 1975 while I was in college. In all that time I have been bothered by what I have seen as a failure by CPA's to really help small business owners.
Let me expand – every year polls show that local CPA's are the small business owners most trusted adviser. So why am I bothered? Well another statistic that is often quoted is that 80% of new businesses fail in the first five years and another 80% survive but are gone within ten years. Easy statistic to quote but it ignores the personal cost. When a business fails – a business owner loses their money and their families money, employees lose their jobs, vendors and banks are not repaid and another dream dies!
And what do local CPA's do? Well we make money off them by doing their tax return and their bookkeeping and, of course, we will work closely to help the survivors (those who can afford to pay us) with business consulting. But, with the start-ups and struggling businesses we just do triage – we send the failures to bankruptcy attorneys and shake our head in disgust at the mistakes that led to these failures.
So my second purpose is simple – to provide small business owners a resource that they can use and afford to help them survive and thrive.
Let the fun begin!