Ian and I had lunch yesterday with our wicked smart “virtual CFO,” Joey Brannon. Since Eat Media’s inception, Joey, who owns Axiom CPA, has been our right hand financial man. We tell him our goals, he helps us make the right choices and he isn’t afraid to hold our feet to the fire. (Plus he draws right on his window, which is super cool and keeps us creative types engaged as he talks about FUTA and SUTA.)

Some of the many lessons I’ve learned from working with Joey:
-    Write out an org chart for where you expect to be in the next year.
-    Rent an office space large enough to accommodate this org chart.
-    Keep a minimum of three months operating costs in a separate bank account.
-    When interviewing potential employees, look for those who ask “vision questions” rather than “how much” questions.
-    Speaking of employees, most of the time, young and hungry trumps experienced and set-in-their-ways.
-    Keep a running spreadsheet of your projected sales, labor costs and monthly operating expenses. Organize it by month. At the end of each quarter, plug in your actuals, and adjust your budgeting accordingly.
- It might take an hour to write out a process for an action that could take you five minutes to complete. But that hour you spend documenting a process will be your LAST hour working on the task (vs. a lifetime of five minutes).

Yesterday, Joey told us about a few things he’s been doing at his own business—things we hope to do someday soon:
-    Time blocking: Schedule one day (or one morning) a week to work on your business.
-    If, as a business owner, you’re not taking at least as much vacation time as you’d get working for someone else, it’s time to re-evaluate.
-    Even better, decide how many vacation days you want to take this year, and block off the time. If your time is billable, figure out how much you need to increase your billable hours each week to make up for your time out of the office.
-    Make updating operations manuals part of your employee’s jobs. This applies to everything from documenting their daily processes to keeping their job descriptions up to date.

For a goldmine of more small business tips, check out Joey’s blog.

—Britta

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Content, Content Marketing, Small business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.