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What is an Exit strategy?

What is your exit strategy? What plans are currently in place? It takes two … We’ve often heard the phrase “businesses don’t plan to fail, they just fail to plan” but this task involves future planning and because it’s so difficult, many business owners just don’t bother. If it’s a 5 year plan you’re looking [...]

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New Investors to ISAs 2013

Great News  -  the stock market is starting to receive some good data i.e. Oil production in the US will rise by 25% by 2014 according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) – because of this and other positive signs, the FTSE 100 is now trading today at over 6100 today (Jan 10 2013). I [...]

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What is the Net Asset Value of a business?

The Net Asset Value (NAV) of a business is obtained by examining the business Balance Sheet carefully and deducting the ALL the Liabilities from ALL the Assets of the business. (see below for definitions) In many ways it shows the owner’s current stake in the business – particularly when assessing the worth of a private [...]

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Making use of Hargreaves Lansdown Research Work

I’ve been working hard evaluating Hargreaves Lansdown latest top 150 funds report – published in November 2012.  At a glance, it enables you to compare the performance of over 700 investment funds in the marketplace. That’s the good news – the bad news is you can now easily compare any ISA funds you currently own, [...]

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Building Confidence in the Decision Making Process – Low or High?

How confident are you in explaining how the following terms relate to people within your organisation? Your personal understanding, combined with intellegent input from staff, who truly understand the critical issues, could be crucial to your on-going success. These issue include: On Finance … Balance sheet, gross margins, net margins, ROI, ratios, bank recs, cash [...]

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Topics covered – through a consultancy or a mentoring approach

The selection below consists of a mixture of finance and business skills you may need to acquire or develop: Accounting Issues (finance and management) Reading Profit and Loss Accounts with confidence Interpreting Balance Sheets and completing health checks on your own or on other companies Introducing and managing effective budgetary control systems Determining BEP at [...]

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Don’t plough all your profits back into the business …………..

Don’t plough all your profits back into the business   …………..  that plan is so wrong, and for so many different reasons! Here are just 2. The current economic climate clearly shows why this plan is very risky. Who knows what’s going to happen next? Whether you are a garage owner, print specialist, IT supplier or [...]

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What is your exit strategy?

What plans are currently in place? We’ve often heard the phrase “businesses don’t plan to fail, they just fail to plan” but the the task of developing a suitable exit strategy requires a lot of future planning, and is often seen to be so difficult, that it is rarely undertaken. If it’s a 5 year [...]

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Understanding Terminology – Fixed and Variable Costs

Every decision that an organisation makes will have some impact on costing issues and eventually the bottom line. To make smart decisions it is vital to understand the relationship between fixed and variable costs and then be able to apply these concepts correctly to either Absorption or Marginal Costing techniques. Fixed Cost – a cost [...]

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ISA Nightmare

I’ve just had a run in with one UK ISA supplier – however most of them are pretty poor on communication  – the initial dispute was on interest rates – they said I’d signed up for 3.75% 3 year deal and I had to argue strongly that the rate agreed  in their office was 4.25% [...]

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