Please answer the following questions truthfully
Which of the comment(s) below, best represents you?
- Feel it’s important to understand more about the documents your accountant prepares, but not exactly sure why.
- Can’t really think about attending anything that deals with financial issues – fearful the jargon is going to be way over the top.
- Analysing numbers stuff is also OTT for me – you think you’ll probably need an ‘A’ level in maths just to get started!
- Scared you’ll feel a right fool in a group situation, especially if you feel you may not have the confidence to answer even basic questions, if asked.
- Too busy to get to grips with the subject – but know it’s an important skill to understand better, if you are serious about improving ‘bottom line’ results.
Ticked more than 3 points? The good news is you’re not alone.
Like many others, you could benefit greatly from a short taster programme.
You’re not a dummy for attending the ‘Finance for Dummies’ programme – but you might be if you decided not to even give it a try.
This programme is designed to cover the basic concepts:
First – the numbers and logic and second – the vocabulary and jargon.
It’s a lot to take in, especially if you have tried a one day, action packed courses in the past. Failing to get the basics fully understood and ‘hard wired’ right from the beginning, means subsequent topics are waste of time. Plus, content can be quickly forgotten, especially if not ‘hard wired’ and used regularly, making it almost impossible to apply to specific issues, as and when, it’s needed.
Learning by doing (not simply listening) - it’s the only way
Each session is of 3 hours duration, run either morning, afternoon or early evening – helping keep work schedules in place and keeping the fear of ‘number overload’ to a minimum and to reduce the risk of potential headaches!
It’s how the learning is ‘delivered’ that’s key to building long-lasting skills in this important area – splitting concepts and issues down into ‘digestible chunks’ and only moving forward when everyone’s got the message, is the trick that needs to be mastered by any coach/trainer. Such ‘starter type’ programme courses are available – but can be hard to find!
Ian Linnegan - provides such a programme, usually delivered to small ‘in-house’ groups.
Attend these sessions first – it may be all that you need!
For best results, it’s easier to work with groups of two/three, preferably from the same company – e.g. owner and a staff member from IT and Sales, HR, Production etc.
Also ideal for husband and wife partnerships – so you both start to ‘sing from same hymn sheet’!
Small group sessions enables REAL issues to be discussed and developed during the sessions (both appropriate and private to your own operations).
Ian uses his own specially developed workbooks, combined with a mixture of Excel spreadsheets – building concepts from sole traders right through to the accounts of limited liability companies. .
The main elements are covered in three half day sessions ….. with just a small amount of preparation required before the next session.
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Nail the Basics (1) – Getting to the Bottom of Balance Sheets (Assets, Liabilities, Capital – how it works – covering issues like goodwill/depreciation etc.).
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Nail the Basics (2) – P&L Account Secrets Uncovered (why we bother to determine ‘gross’ and ‘net’ profits and why expenses and revenues are processed the way they are).
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Exploit the Basics – Complete a Health Check on your own (and/or other businesses) and review how you can better assess your new business ideas and ways to fund them (Looking at key ratios e.g. ROI and Cash flow Analysis).
All the prior skills that’s need to attend the 3 sessions is the ability to add and subtract, using a calculator.
From this point, you will have substantially increased confidence to speak with your accountant (or staff) and be better able to select other accounting tools to help further improve the ‘bottom line’ results.
Too busy to attend any type of formal sessions? Ian can deliver the sessions via SKYPE – try a session FOC to see if it can work for you.
NOTE: Ian also provides occasional on-going support - especially at budgeting times – when a short refresher session or a quick chat on a few points may be all that’s required – via phone or Skype.
More info on Ian
