Will I set up my company in France because I might be in Paris on business and I would like to reclaim the VAT on taxi fares?
Another example of putting the tax cart in front of the business horse!
You can create bad practices that embed themselves like fossils at the heart of the business and continue to be corrosive for a long time to come.
From the board of directors down, does everyone know how to do their job to make sure that the numbers are right and are produced in time to be useful?
The CFO of a business told me how they had suffered a software glitch and the accounting software had locked so that no one could open the file and do any accounting work.
When the phone rings in our open-plan office it interrupts everyone, which is fine if it’s a client, a prospect or someone else that we need to speak to. But a substantial minority of incoming calls are people trying to sell to us and those calls are a real pain.
We were also very cross – Springsteen, McCartney, Twist & Shout, rock’n’roll history in the making right before your eyes, something truly unique and someone pulls the bloody plug!
Once your accounting and finance procedures are running on “automatic pilot” there’s no need for an expensive FD. So the trick is to get to the automatic pilot position and only bring in extra experience when you need it.
It matters less what happens to sales, so long as profits are increasing and the objective is to earn good gross profits from the best-selling products.
All LinkedIn group members get to see the answers which, as well as being potentially useful for them, allows them to form a view as to whether the respondent knows what they’re talking about.
A common theme in companies we have seen recently is that where their business processes are poor they have less money in the bank and more nasty surprises than they should have.
It doesn’t matter what size your business is, you must get the processes right or you lose value.
