Looking for a way to put more money in your pocket?  There are two ways to improve your cash flow:  Increase your income or Decrease your expenses.  And, of course a combination of the two.  

The part that I see some entrepreneurs do that gets tweaked in their business model is they begin to think it’s one OR the other.  It’s sales OR fulfillment.  It’s marketing OR accounting.  It’s research OR maintenance.

The answer of course, is it’s all of those.  

The top line has no practical upper limit, if your business model is scalable.  In other words, if you’re selling horseshoes designed only for Tennessee Walking Horses, you have a limited market. It’s going to be hard to franchise that idea.  I’ve got a limited business model for http://www.DKTaxServices.com as well.  I only work with US taxpayers who have businesses and/or investments.  The fact is that market is about 12 million or more, though, so I have a pretty big market and haven’t even begun to touch it.  

You can grow your business in ways beyond just selling more of what you already have with more customers.  You can also branch off and create ancillary products.  You can teach others what you do.  You can offer low end and high end solutions to maximize the bi-modal business curve.  You can create passive income generators from the assets you already have such as your client base, your reputation, your knowledge or your systems.  You can joint venture.  You can refer related services for a referral fee.  You can sell client base to your competitors. You can buy your competition.  The list goes on and on.

In fact, it can be so much fun looking at the top line of your business and working at new strategies to explode your business, that you might just forget about looking at the bottomline.  The danger with ignoring the bottomline is that one day you might wake up to discover you’ve been working really hard and you have nothing to show for it.

Here are five steps to take right away:

( 1)  Get monthly (at least) financial statements.  If you don’t have a bookkeeper to help you with that, drop my husband Richard a note at Richard@DKTaxServices.com and we can help you find a bookkeeper.

( 2) Determine the key indicators for your business.  What stats do you need to watch to know whether you’re in good shape or bad?  (And no, the bank balance isn’t a good stat)  What are your key profit makers and what are your dogs?

( 3) Review audit controls.  Do you have good controls in place so that no one person can steal you blind?  Or if they do, they don’t do it for very long?

( 4) Review your processes.  What can you do faster and cheaper?  What can you outsource?  What new technology is available?  

( 5) Create systems.  If you need help on that, make sure you go back in my previous blog posts and read about the sticky note system to quickly and easily create systems.  

A business in balance needs a solid TOP LINE and a BOTTOM LINE.