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[T366]The Cash Flow Business

by Russell Dalbey, Rus

So, you've decided to become part of the cash flow business - you understand the basics of the business and are ready to get moving! But how? What do you do for marketing? It can seem overwhelming but if you really think about it, getting started is not as difficult as it may seem. A small amount of education can go a long way to starting your success in the cash flow business.

When most people start marketing their cash flow business, they think it's going to be hard. They think they need to be some kind of whiz to make things happen for them. This is simply not true. There are many basic things successful businesses can do to market themselves.

To start with, there is a wonderful, free resource of print marketing education you already have at your fingertips. You don't have to go anywhere to get it - just look in your mailbox!

We live in a consumer society and have therefore been marketed to our whole lives. We are inundated with mail we don't want for things that we think we don't need. But everything coming to us in the mailbox each day is a goldmine of education! Sit down with everything you've got and take a good look at it. What catches your eye? What do you automatically want to throw away? What's a good offer? What's a bad one? Which ones are familiar and why? Look hard at these little pieces of paper because a lot of work went into them. It's one of the greatest free sources of marketing education you could possibly run across. By looking at the print material you receive on a daily basis, you should be able to get ideas that you could use in your own cash flow business marketing campaign, right?

One of the most basic forms of marketing necessary for anyone in business is the business card. It sounds like a no-brainer, but it's the first piece of print marketing needed to get your business started. As a professional in the cash flow business, you will be talking to people on a regular basis about what you do. You must have something to give them so that your potential clients know how to get in contact with you.

There is no need to be overly fancy when designing your card. Put your name, contact information and what you do on the card. Keep it simple the first time around. Having a fancy logo and great color or texture can be eye catching, but it's more important to have a card with all of your contact information than to have the perfect color. Remember, this is not the art business, it's the cash flow business!

Another form of marketing that can be very effective is a simple postcard. Remember how I said to look at all the stuff in your mailbox? That's where you want to look for ideas. The things that catch the eye are not necessarily the big flashy cards or the super duper deals - it's the personal touches.

When putting your message on the postcard, you want to satisfy their needs in a few sentences. Getting your message across quickly accomplishes two things. First, it serves the reader by getting the point across right away. Secondly, it tells them what the benefit is to them. Always make sure that you are benefit oriented when you are marketing your business. Never talk about the benefit to you. Them doing business with you IS the benefit.

Now, marketing your cash flow business doesn't have to be tough or boring. It can be simple and enjoyable; you just have to get started!

First off what is cash flow? This is how I explain cash flow. It is the amount of money you have left during a given period of time once all your bills are paid. But let us not confuse this with profit and loss statements. Cash flow is a physical thing, how much actual cash is left in the bank, while profit and loss statements are recordings in your financial statements but don't reflect physically held money. And what you have physically available at any one time is the most important metric for your business.

Now if you run a retail business that generates immediate cash from each sale then cash flow and profit and loss statments will more closely reflect each other. But if you are in the business of billing people and waiting to get paid then cash flow becomes the more important of the two.

So that we can fully explain what cash flow is we'll compare it to a profit and loss statement. Over the course of a month or year you'll make sales to customers and you'll bill them at either the time of the sale or once the order is filled depending on the business you're in and the accounting methods you use. When you buy something or pay someone you account for the money right away even if you have thirty days to pay them. Again this depends on your accounting methods but for many small businesses this is the simplest method of accounting to use. Once a bill comes due you pay it.

With cash flow we don't worry about what is billed but instead we worry about how much money is actually collected. On the other end we worry about how much money we actually give to our vendors, employees and other people we owe money to. To stay in business we have to keep paying them. We may be late on occassion but that bill isn't going anywhere till we pay it. So cash flow in it's most basic form is how much money we collect and how much money we send out. For any business that has to give credit to it's customers this is where we can have a problem. Not all your customers are going to pay on time.

It is totally possible for a company to show a profit while in fact losing it's shirt. Inevitably your going to have customers that can't pay their bills on time. This of course can be for any number of reasons. The one's you'll need to watch out for are the one's that don't have the money to pay you. That's the one you could end up facing yourself if you're not careful.

Ideally the amount billed in a given month and the amount collected will be virtually the same or you'll have collected more than you sent out. Then it's a simple matter of managing your expenses. If we lived in a perfect world than that would be the way it goes but we know better. What you as the owner of your business need to do is to effectively manage your cash flow. You need to make sure that what you are spending isn't exceeding what you are collecting not what you're billing. Hopefully you have a credit line with your bank that can help alleviate the problem but if not you need to be very careful or you might wind up using something like your credit cards to help cover the bills. This can only be considered a short tern fix. But it will compound the problem later.

So while your profit and loss statements are in themselves just as important as ever the real gauge of your companies immediate health might better be found in your cash flow statement. Because ending up with a negative number on that balance could eventually leave your bank account empty.

Article Source : Online Marketing

About Author

Both Russell Dalbey & Cash Miller are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Russell Dalbey has sinced written about articles on various topics from Finances, Information Technology and Public Relations. founded the Dalbey Education Institute in 1995 to provide customers with the highest quality of wealth-building products, services and networking resources fo. Russell Dalbey's top article generates over 12100 views. to your Favourites.

Cash Miller has sinced written about articles on various topics from Advertising Guide, Business Loans and Cars. Cash Miller is an experienced entrepreneur and speaker who has spent the last decade as a small business owner. His years of experience running a small business cover such topics as planning, management, marketing, human resources, ecommerce, and taxation. Cash Miller's top article generates over 14800 views. to your Favourites.