Artwork

Content provided by Quiet Light Brokerage and Quiet Light. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Quiet Light Brokerage and Quiet Light or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Player FM - Podcast App
Go offline with the Player FM app!

Increase Your Profit by Implementing These Guaranteed Accounting Practices with Tyler Jeffcoat

31:52
 
Share
 

Manage episode 250254380 series 2465935
Content provided by Quiet Light Brokerage and Quiet Light. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Quiet Light Brokerage and Quiet Light or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.

Cash-flow forecasting can be the key to running, building, and eventually selling your e-commerce business. Today’s guest is an accountant and successful business builder who helps owners run their businesses with successful financial results. Aside from traditional accounting, his firm offers fractional CFO services to his clients.

As we have said many times here on the podcast, bookkeeping is not something business owners should do without an expert. Today we are talking to accounting expert Tyler Jeffcoat. Tyler built and sold a healthcare company and has experienced the acquisition process firsthand. In building his current business, Seller Accountant, he made sure that his focus was razor sharp on what he could offer to clients in order to deliver top results.

Episode Highlights:

  • How Tyler’s fractional services work for the clients.
  • How his service cost is offset by the value why it’s less expensive than inhouse.
  • Cash-flow forecasting and how it helps owners with profitability
  • Ways operation data plays into the full forecast.
  • The impact of not forecasting.
  • Refinancing and SBA lending as an option in a moment of need.
  • The importance of SKU grading to keep on top of product performance.
  • The difference between cash and accrual accounting
  • Tools that can help the layman forecast on his own.
  • Why you need to track your numbers on an inventory value.
  • The benefit of outsourcing while focusing on core expertise.
Transcription:

Mark: So Joe I’m normally not a big advocate of business but I’m becoming more and more of one and in the entrepreneurial community people always ask what book are you reading now and I’m usually thinking well it was actually on World War II or some other kind of obscure topic. Because when I’m off of work I like to be off of work. But this past year I picked up a few different business books based on some recommendations. And one that I read that I would recommend to anybody is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight; the founder of Nike. And I don’t want to give away a lot of secrets with this book because honestly, it’s a great read; it reads more of like just a novel or story of how he started Nike but one of the things that really resonated with me specifically because we deal with so many people that have Amazon businesses was how long Nike had problems with cash flow and how long that they were living on the float. And they were living on a very large float where they were writing checks that weren’t in the bank account yet and they were counting on that money being in there. It’s the nature of any growing business especially a physical product business is that the cash flow comes in, you reinvest in the product, you keep growing at a rapid rate. It can be really hard to manage that cash flow. And I know that we talked to Scott Dietz a few weeks ago on forecasting but forecasting doesn’t really matter if you don’t have any cash in the bank and you’re closing the loop on this or kind of continuing this conversation today with Tyler Jefcoat about cash flow forecasting.

Joe: Yeah Tyler and I have been working together off and on with a variety of different clients. Tyler owns Seller Accountant and he’s just a smart guy. He’s built his own company, sold it, and then started any commerce bookkeeping company specifically focused for the most part on his own businesses.

Mark: Is that a phone I hear in the background?

Joe: No, that was not a phone at all. No.

Mark: I figured that you’re so busy people are calling you all the time.

Joe: No, that’s my wife actually. Sorry folks. Sorry. Tyler, yes but the really cool thing about what Tyler does is cash flow forecasting, right? So he does fractional CFO services on top of is bookkeeping services and only for his own clients. And he does in the different levels. He does monthly reviews with some, quarterly reviews of some, and then gets into deeper reviews with others. But the cash flow forecasting model that he went over and shared with me I saw it on another video in a webinar that he did and then I had him show it to me and then he’s sharing it in the show notes of this podcast. It’s a cash flow model along with the video that talks about it and I know going back to my e-commerce days before I sold I did that; I did the float just like Phil Knight, a little smaller level of course.

Mark: But just like Phil Knight.

Joe: Just like Phil Knight, but it was the same thing. You are paying for that inventory with a credit card or you’re just playing the flow and it’s ridiculous. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have a big staff but those that are growing beyond that solopreneur aspect and they have to worry about payroll and things of that nature I think it’s really, really important to focus on cash flow. So Tyler goes over that quite a bit here and the links in the show notes will help anybody that’s having issues in that area.

Mark: These are fantastic tools to put in our war chest of things that we can use as business owners to be able to plan the growth of our businesses. So forecasting is something I’ve been skeptical in the past. Again the conversation with Scott Dietz and my experience with forecasting through his company has really turned me around to this and now I’m super excited to see this because again cash flow forecasting might be one of the most important things in a business as it’s growing.

Joe: It’s important but what else is important? I’ve got to call my wife back so let’s go to the podcast.

Joe: Hey folks Joe Valley here from Quiet Light Brokerage and today well I ranted in the intro with Mark about bookkeeping. I’ve talked to at least 5,000 entrepreneurs over the last seven years and the vast majority of those when it comes to bookkeeping they say I got this and the reality is they don’t. So we’ve got an expert on the podcast here, Tyler Jefcoat from the Seller Accountant. Tyler, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast.

Tyler: Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Joe: I could rant and rave for hours on time about this because it’s the number one reason people don’t sell their businesses or sell them for a heck of a lot less. Somebody said to me the other day Tyler that when they think about their P&Ls they bleed from their eyeballs and I think that sums it up for how a lot of people feel. Alright so as you know on this podcast we don’t do fancy intros, we want to hear from you so tell us about yourself and your business.

Tyler: Yeah, well thanks again for having me. My company is Seller Accountant. I’m coming at this as a guy who sold a health care company about two years ago. We had a good run; zero to a hundred employees in about four years and I was a minority guy and I went through the M&A process and it was interesting. So as we built this accounting firm; I’m an accountant, we really built it around two ideas, Joe. One was we wanted to have a very vertical focus so we only do e-commerce and the second thing is that we want to focus on not just the price of admission of just having clean books but having the ability to use data to drive profitability. So I think that’s why you and I have resonated with each other so well was I want to partner with brokers that really have the best interest of clients at heart and your clients all have the same issues which is we got to have investor great books so we can go to market and so yeah man it’s great to be here.

Joe: Cool. Everybody that’s listening knows how I do feel about the books but I want to go beyond what you do at Seller Accountant. You manage people’s books, you do an incredible job with that, do you streamline it? It’s not expensive. It’s much better for their bottom line than if they had an in-house bookkeeper. There’s no question that that math works but let’s talk about some of the additional services you do. I saw a video where you talked about your fractional CFO services, where you talked about cash flow analysis, Cost of Goods Sold analysis and some of those things. What are the top two or three things that you focus on with clients on I guess is your fractional CFO services that you do that for?

Tyler: It is and is still part of Seller Accountant but in addition to just doing the bookkeeping each month for a bunch of Amazon and other e-commerce sellers we provide a fractional CFO service. And so I think what makes it powerful Joe is that we’re just crazy focused; again we’re crazy focused, my eyes don’t blink when I look at a P&L for e-commerce but I do it all day long. And so our ability to step into somebody’s business and see things differently because we look at it kind of like you do Joe honestly; you’re looking at P&Ls constantly also but then focus on kind of the big things on a macro level. How does a seller really understand how their sales channels are performing over time? So that kind of goes back to the visibility of the book but it’s more important than that, it’s understanding okay, is Amazon the right channel for me to focus on versus Shopify? That’s kind of one of the big discussions. And then we tend to the other kind of macro discussion as you allude to is around cash flow. This is a cash hungry business that we run; this e-commerce retail and a lot of the sellers tend to be undercapitalized meaning they’re not coming to the table with 2 million dollars in free cash to just dump in inventory. And so our ability to understand not just what we think our sales are going to be next year but what we think our actual cost are going to be related to inventory when we’re going to have to spend that money, that’s critical. And so that’s a discussion we have with our clients and then honestly just understand the profitability of our different product lines and SKUs. Those are areas where we can really help our clients not just know what the bottom line is for a given month but help them get the data they need to make better decisions as a CEO.

Joe: And you do this as part of the fractional CFO services. You meet with these clients once a month after you review their P&Ls and you do a deeper dive. Are there other different levels of fractional CFO services where you’re spending more time with some than others; how does it work?

Tyler: Yeah there are and at this point, most of our CFO clients are bookkeeping clients that have chosen to layer on the CFO service. The reason for that is it is very challenging for me to add a lot of value efficiently for you if I don’t understand your books and you just have a really nice way of doing the books. So yes they can choose to have quarterly calls. We have some that will meet even less frequently but it’s basically normally quarterly or monthly. And we have some things in the pipeline that may allow us to just generate some value and it’d be a little bit less can you get on Tyler’s calendar because I think that can be something that can be prohibitive. But at this point, we’ve got a great monthly service, a great quarterly service, and I think maybe it’ll be somewhere around the neighborhood of 70 million dollars in e-commerce sales that I’m responsible for; me and my team for just the CFO side of it this year. And so it gives us an update that we can speak intelligently about what’s happening in the business.

Joe: You must be very expensive then, yes?

Tyler: Oh man we’re so expensive, yeah. No, you know what I mean. I would say we provide extreme value to our clients. And I would just say this we’re not cheap; I don’t want to be cheap, you want the provider that you can partner with us providing superior value. But I will say this we are way less expensive than actually trying to hire somebody. And if we can generate the kind of value that makes your business grow or allows you to get maybe a better multiple when you go to market in a year I don’t think we’re charging nearly enough for that to be honest with you and I love it, man. This is the fun part of the business; it’s really understanding how to help business owners make money. How do we actually turn this pile of work into a profitable business? And so for me, this is kind of what gets me out of bed. So it’s really I’m an accountant, of course, it’s about money; we want to make a living but this is a part of the business I’m passionate about.

Joe: Well let’s talk about some of those individual things you do as the fractional CFO provider. I saw a cash flow forecasting video that you did. This is an enormous problem for e-commerce business owners and a lot of will just go the way of an Amazon loan at 14, 15%. I guess it’s lower when you do the math. But talk to us about the cash flow forecasting that you do for these clients and how that helps them in terms of profitability.

Tyler: Yeah. So when it comes to cash flow forecasting I think where most entrepreneurs stop is they take the time to open a spreadsheet and say what do I think my sales are going to be in the next six months? By the way, I would caution you there, if you ever run a forecast in the future of your business and every month in the future is way more profitable than your last six months of them, there’s a good chance that you are kind of suffering from optimism that happens. All of us entrepreneurs we love running our businesses and we’re like just tomorrow we’re going to make money, now next month that’s going to be wildly profitable.

Joe: You’re delusional. We know that after doing this for so long that there is great years and bad years.

Tyler: You may run into a P&L and somebody hasn’t made money in a year and they’re like but guess what Joe tomorrow we’re going to make money. And so my encouragement is to go ahead and be honest with yourself about how your business is performing and take a minute to say okay based on our seasonality, based on the products we’re going to launch; as the actual owner of these e-commerce businesses you guys are in the best position to guess what your sales are going to be next year and put them in a spreadsheet Expected Sales, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And then if you look at your historical data you can say okay our cost of goods sold, our margins have tended to be at a certain level. And so most entrepreneurs are pretty good at building a forecast around what their operation is going to generate. We kind of know what our overhead is. We kind of know what our advertising budget is going to be. We know if our rent’s going to go up next year. And so you got to do that work but a lot of entrepreneurs stop there and you can’t stop there. Because of the impact of debt and the impact of inventory and the impact frankly of taxes you need to take that operational data and then work it into a full cash flow forecast for maybe the next year or the next six months. And so the way we do it is we take that baseline info that I just mentioned; how much profit are you expecting your operation to generate each month over the next six months or a year. Okay, great, now tell us what your loan payments are going to be, what’s the cash coming out of your business for; for that Amazon loan or for your SBA loan or for your line of credit. Okay great, let’s take that into account each month and then inventory forecasting can be kind of tricky. The more I thought about this I think it just needs to be simple. You have an average amount of days that it takes you to; you’re going to issue a PO and you’re going to get your container sent from China or wherever you’re getting your goods. And so if I have forecasted that in April I’m going to have $30,000 in cost of goods sold then I’m going to have to pay for that $30,000 in inventory probably about 90 days before that. And so if you know what the waiting times are in your inventory you can use your forecast that you just did for your quote-unquote P&L; your profit and loss to basically guess okay I’m going to need to have that 30 grand in the bank in January so that it’s ready to sell in April. And I mean they’re going to have to fund that inventory purchase with some kind of great terms with the supplier or I’m going to have to have a loan, I’m going to have cash in the bank. And so what I advise the clients to do is to kind of what are my inventory purchases going to be? This is not a surprise. It’s going to take a few months to fulfill it. Let’s get that on this cash flow picture and then the other thing that you might consider is if there’s going to be any owner distributions including your CPA may have you take a tax distribution once a quarter to keep Uncle Sam happy. And so this all goes together; your operations, your financing activities, your inventory, and then lastly the investing kind of from your owners and it’s going to give you; it’s not uncommon to have a picture where you expected to make money in the month of January, on paper you have profit but because of your debt payments or because of your purchases of future inventory your cash flow is actually negative for that same month. And so we just blew a spreadsheet; in fact, I’m glad to share it with you. I just have it in a Google Sheet here where we try to understand the impact of all of those factors on cash flow. So if there’s going to be a negative on the sheet I knew it now instead of it being an emergency.

Joe: We’ll link that up so people can use it and try it themselves and then reach out to you for help if they need it. But what’s the impact? You talked about good money at good rates versus bad money at bad rates. So what’s the negative impact if they didn’t do the forecasts and they come up against the month of January and they need to get a loan somewhere; what do you see people do and what’s the drawback of having little to no notice of it?

Tyler: Yeah. So there’s two major impacts. One is if I know that I’m going to run out of cash in six months I can make two important adjustments that I don’t have the luxury of making if I’m right on top of that shortfall. So if I’ve got six months I can cut expenses. If I need to actually lower some overhead if I need to renegotiate my rent if I need to do anything if I need to slow down if I need to go to my suppliers and renegotiate those payment terms. I’ve got some internal leverage. In other words, I know how important it is to me because I know I’m out of money say in April if I don’t figure this out now. The second thing is if I know I’m going to run out of cash in four to six months I’ve bought myself a bunch of time to go find the right kind of loan if I have to pick up some debt on the balance sheet. And just as you alluded to I’ve got six months and have a pretty good business I might be able to get through SBA underwriting, I might be able to get all sorts of favorable lending options but if I wake up and realize oh crud tomorrow I’m out of money I don’t have a lot of options. I’m going to take whatever money is going to fund me in the next week. And I would say that’s where a lot of sellers get in trouble. They haven’t forecasted effectively and so now they’re out of money. They’ve got to fulfill that PO tomorrow and so now they’re in a bind where how are they going to get stuff on the shelves to be able to sell it. And so yeah that’s what I would say to that.

Joe: So on the SBA underwriting, if somebody owns an e-commerce business and they’ve got good financials, they’ve owned it for a while and they use services like yours you’re seeing them able to go out and get SBA financing to help with cash flow of their current business.

Tyler: Yeah I think there’s; I don’t know that I’ve seen; I’ve seen more SBA lending when the deals come together for an actual exit but I will say this if you have a couple of years of good financials and you’re carrying some debt I’ve definitely seen some of our clients refinance other lines of credit using SBA lending once they have a couple of years of good financial history.

Joe: That makes sense.

Tyler: You can go through the underwriting and what ends up happening is the bank has a much lower risk profile because the SBA; the government is going to back a certain percentage of that loan. And so it’s always going to be your best terms, your best interest rate; the underwriting is a bit of a pain but again if you have six months you can get through that process and explore that as an option instead of having to take whatever emergency lending process.

Joe: Yeah for those that don’t understand the terms on the SBA lending it’s generally 10 years and the interest rate is somewhere between 5 ½ to 8 ½%. Compare that to an Amazon loan where the term is somewhere between 14 and 15%; I’m sorry the interest rate and the term is generally 12 months. They take it out of your account as they make deposits.

Tyler: And I’ve seen Amazon be as high as 19, 20 percent and they will underwrite it down to 11 but it never gets anywhere close to touching the SBA.

Joe: Yeah, it’s incredibly convenient. There’s no question about it but there’s a pretty steep cost that comes along with it.

Tyler: The only one that steeper is when you have to get more of what’s called like a payday funding option maybe like a Payability; nothing wrong. It’s a good service in the right context but those cost capital numbers end up getting up in the 25, 30% range if you’re not careful and that can really crush your business.

Joe: Okay, cash flow taking, money off the table, these things are what keep entrepreneurs up at night so I love the fact that you help them with that and we’ll share that in the show notes. Let’s jump on to something that I think is incredibly important when we talk to people about selling their business. Well ultimately we’re going to help them when they’re ready but we’d prefer to talk to them 12 to 18 months in advance so that they’re working with someone like you in order to prepare the best exit possible. And we often talk to them about renegotiating their cost of goods sold, focusing in on those inventories that are hero SKUs and those that are just okay. We always say you can break even doing nothing so why bother but often when it looks like they’re breaking even they lose money. You help them focus in through your fractional CFO services on hero SKUs, cost of goods sold, things of that nature; yes?

Tyler: Yeah I think something that’s really important whether you have a fractional CFO or you do it yourself, it’s extremely important to do a SKU grading. So I don’t even care if you have a thousand skews you have to have some kind of a system for understanding which product lines are successful and which ones are losers. Which ones are the heroes like you said Joe, which ones are duds? And I have been shocked; I’ve been continually shocked as we do these analyses for clients to see that a guy’s favorite SKU is taking them like an 80% advertising budget to move the SKU.

Joe: That doesn’t sound profitable. Yeah.

Tyler: No, that’s bad. Yeah. And just in case you’re wondering, an 80% advertising budget is terrible. But they didn’t know that because it’s buried in this entire pile of SKUs and so it’s extremely important to understand at least occasionally how each of your products is performing so that you can support the good ones, renegotiate the bad ones, or kill them.

Joe: Yeah. So revenue insanity profit; no revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. So it gets down to understanding your profit and loss statements, digging into revenue by SKU, profit by SKU. I get most people don’t get this. A lot of people that I work with that come across like I did early on I tell people openly I fell asleep in accounting class in college. I’ve since had to adapt and learn and now I understand it very, very well. But most people don’t understand the simple difference between cash and accrual accounting and that when you’re selling a business the books need to be presented on an accrual basis. Can you describe the difference between the two in layman’s terms? That’s the challenge; layman’s terms.

Tyler: Sure. So simply put if you have cash going out of your business, say you’re buying inventory to actually stroke the check and you have a deposit coming into your business say the deposit from Amazon and you book that sale when the cash hits your account and you book that expense when you pay the money that’s called cash basis accounting. And from a compliance tax standpoint, for most small businesses that is acceptable. But here’s the problem and you got anyone who’s looked at their P&L and saw a negative gross profit for a month. When you look at there and say why did I sell $100,00 this month but all of a sudden had $200,000 of inventory expenses? That doesn’t make any rational sense. The reason is that you book the entire inventory the day you stroke the check instead of having the inventory asset and expensing it slowly as you sell the goods. And so in an accrual accounting method, you are on a quest to attach the sales dollar to the expenses that are associated with that dollar. So if I sold; let’s just use that same number, if I sold $100,000 on Amazon in November I want to know how much it actually cost me; what the actual inventory expense for those units were that I sold in that month. And so you can kind of tell me and hear me say it’s a little more difficult. Getting good accrual books takes a little bit more work. You have to deal with receivables. You’ve got to book things a little bit more sophisticatedly but it’s the only way to be able to answer the question Joe did I make money last month? Because if you’re doing it on a cash basis you really have no idea. You know when you’ve made your investments but you don’t actually know whether your business is profitable unless you have an accrual system.

Joe: And is that something that; I know it’s hard to set up in Quick Books online but what do people have to have? Their landed cost of goods sold or their cost of goods sold the freight might be separate in your P&Ls; is it something that a layman could set up and figure out and flip to or does it really take a tremendous amount of experience like you have?

Tyler: Well it could. I mean I don’t want to; let me just say it’s worth the effort. I will say this for everyone who’s listening to this to this podcast if you haven’t explored a tool called A2A accounting; literally the letter A, the number 2, the letter A. So A2A Accounting, I think it’s A2Aaccounting.com that is a tool that lets you kind of pre map Amazon journal entries and it makes doing the accruals a lot easier. Well, what makes e-commerce so challenging is that Amazon pays us every 14 days normally and some of those sales might have happened in one month but I’m getting the entire paycheck from Amazon in the next month. And so I would say Joe yes normally having somebody that really understands e-commerce accounting is very helpful but for smaller sellers or sellers who don’t have the budget to hire a team like mine it’s worth learning how to do it and it’s worth trying to understand; you mentioned the term landed cost of goods sold if I spend $100,000 on inventory, I’ve stroke the check, I’ve sent the wire, I have that inventory now, it’s really important that I try to understand what that fully landed value is per unit. So let’s say I bought a thousand of a particular SKU I can’t just say I spent $100,000 divided by 1,000 so I’ve got basically was that a dollar SKU, right? It doesn’t work that way.

Joe: Because you pay the extra 10 cents to ship each individual unit; yeah.

Tyler: Yeah you got shipping, tariffs, duties, everything else you need to just do the math. Make sure you have a spreadsheet; call it kind of a Master SKU Spreadsheet and understand what it really costs you per unit to get your product to the customer. And that’s probably one of the biggest keys to understand.

Joe: And let me just put some reality to this in terms of the why. Look anybody out there listening is like why the hell do I need to do that? The reason is because eventually, you’re going to sell your business. You’re going to get bought out. You’re going to sell it to a partner. You and your partner are going to get in a fight and you’re going to want to move in different directions. Or you own it with your wife or husband and you’re going to get a divorce or at least half of you are. Or you’re going to die. It’s all going to happen eventually so you need to have your numbers on an accrual basis because when you sell your physical products e-commerce business you’re going to get paid a multiple of your seller’s discretionary earnings plus the landed cost of good sellable inventory on hand at the time of closing. Landed. If you’re not tracking that landed figure and you’re paying an extra 50 cents per unit you could be losing tens of thousands of dollars in inventory value at the sale. The other thing in terms of cash versus accrual and doing it yourself versus hiring somebody like Tyler is that if you’re off by a couple of percentage points; let’s just say that you’re spending a million dollars a year in revenue. It’s not a small business, it’s a sizable one. And I’ve talked to these people that do this and have in-house bookkeepers and I’ll give you some math on why you shouldn’t admit it but if you’re off by 2% on a million bucks that’s $2,000 right? That’s not right; that’s $20,000 that you’re off by. Your business is probably sizable selling it 4, 4 ½ times that would mean that your numbers; your profit, your discretionary earnings are off by $20,000. The value of your business is $80,000 off if you’re a four-time multiple. So you’re either overpricing the business by 80,000 because you overestimated or underestimated your cost of goods sold or worse yet you’re undervaluing your business because you’re off by 2% and your business is worth $80,000 more than you’ve got it listed for. These things matter. You worked so damn hard on driving more revenue and looking at your bottom line. But if you don’t get the details right like this you’re just wasting a whole bunch of money. Okay, that’s my momentary rant now I’m going to go into another one. The services that you provide Tyler and there are others out there like you that’s just like there’s other brokers out there besides Quiet Light; it is what it is but I talked to somebody last week, they spent $24,000 a year on an in-house bookkeeper just out of college that does everything the CPA tells her to do. The numbers are all wrong. They’re recording deposits; it was on a cash basis, it was completely and utterly incorrect. And this person thought they were doing something like 1.2 million in discretionary earnings, it really was about 800,000. If they fired the bookkeeper; we’ll do the quick math for everybody, fire your bookkeeper is my message, $24,000 a year, hire somebody that does the e-commerce bookkeeping like Tyler and Seller Accountant, even if it’s let’s call it 600 bucks a month and you’re doing an all-encompassing service it’s only $7,200 a year, right? So 24,000 minus the 7,200, it’s $16,800 in annual savings to the bottom line numbers of your business. If your business is worth four times that adds $67,000 to the list price of your business when you eventually sell it. It’s simple and logical math and you don’t have an HR problem anymore; you don’t have that bookkeeper in-house, you’ve got somebody like Tyler helping you who’s a Bulldogs fan by the way. For those watching the video, stand up just a little bit; what’s that logo on your shirt say?

Tyler: Man I’m a University of Georgia guy. I’m across the street from the campus here in Athens and Double Dog. I have my MBA and accounting degree here. Joe, I will say this it really is it’s not even so much what you could pay per hour because, to be honest with you the client that’s doing a million in discretionary earnings is unlikely to be 600 bucks a month for any service even me if we’re getting it done right. But the reality is that if you’re paying someone your full-time salary; I know this when I had a company with 100 employees. We always had somebody sitting around. If you’re going to carry someone you’re always having to get them at a rate where you can’t use their full capacity or frankly if you’re using your full capacity you got to hire somebody else. And so it’s inefficient because; and there are some businesses that need to have a full-time controller. I think if you’re doing 15 million a year in revenue you probably need to have a high-end controller on your staff. At that point, that’s a six-figure job you’re looking to hire for. I think the issue that the seller may be that you’re describing would come across is not only are they spending the 24,000; even if they paid me the same amount to do it it’s actually going to be done correct and when I go to market those books are going to be stated in accrual basis and they’re going to have everything the way they want it. And we can scale with them without them having to hire an entire new employee. So I think that really is a big benefit unless you are; this is what I’ve learned in general. And this is every business I’ve worked in or own, I want to make sure that I inhouse my core competency; whatever my competitive advantage is I’m going to make sure that I have teammates that allow me to perpetuate that competitive advantage. Anything that isn’t my strength I want to find someone that that is their strength; someone that can do it more efficiently and can do it better than I can. I’m not a broker if I need a broker I want to go to someone like Joe that gets the broker business and can do it more efficiently I’m going to pay Joe but I’m going to make a lot of mistakes and lose a lot more money if I try to do it myself. It’s really the same with accounting or PPC or anything else. I’m a big believer. That’s what my dad always told me. It’s just spend your time where you’re making your money. I want to get so focused that I can be the best in the world at something and then I want to outsource as much as I can so that I can be better at my core rather than trying to fix my errors all the time and fix my screw-ups and that kind of thing.

Joe: I think that’s incredibly well said. I don’t have a whole lot to add to that. I think it’s just brilliant. I think it’s a great business methodology and mindset and it’s what everybody should be adopting. Tyler, how do the audience members learn more about your services?

Tyler: Yeah so thanks again for having me, Joe. So SellerAccountant.com is our website. You can learn more about our services there. Feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to have a discussion with you. And yes it’s been a pleasure to being on the show.

Joe: And you’re going to share that cash flow forecasting spreadsheet. We’ll put that in the show notes so everybody can do their own numbers and if it’s confusing reach out to Tyler he’d be there to help you. Thanks for the honor man, I appreciate it.

Tyler: You got it.

Links and Resources:

  continue reading

335 episodes

Artwork
iconShare
 
Manage episode 250254380 series 2465935
Content provided by Quiet Light Brokerage and Quiet Light. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Quiet Light Brokerage and Quiet Light or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.

Cash-flow forecasting can be the key to running, building, and eventually selling your e-commerce business. Today’s guest is an accountant and successful business builder who helps owners run their businesses with successful financial results. Aside from traditional accounting, his firm offers fractional CFO services to his clients.

As we have said many times here on the podcast, bookkeeping is not something business owners should do without an expert. Today we are talking to accounting expert Tyler Jeffcoat. Tyler built and sold a healthcare company and has experienced the acquisition process firsthand. In building his current business, Seller Accountant, he made sure that his focus was razor sharp on what he could offer to clients in order to deliver top results.

Episode Highlights:

  • How Tyler’s fractional services work for the clients.
  • How his service cost is offset by the value why it’s less expensive than inhouse.
  • Cash-flow forecasting and how it helps owners with profitability
  • Ways operation data plays into the full forecast.
  • The impact of not forecasting.
  • Refinancing and SBA lending as an option in a moment of need.
  • The importance of SKU grading to keep on top of product performance.
  • The difference between cash and accrual accounting
  • Tools that can help the layman forecast on his own.
  • Why you need to track your numbers on an inventory value.
  • The benefit of outsourcing while focusing on core expertise.
Transcription:

Mark: So Joe I’m normally not a big advocate of business but I’m becoming more and more of one and in the entrepreneurial community people always ask what book are you reading now and I’m usually thinking well it was actually on World War II or some other kind of obscure topic. Because when I’m off of work I like to be off of work. But this past year I picked up a few different business books based on some recommendations. And one that I read that I would recommend to anybody is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight; the founder of Nike. And I don’t want to give away a lot of secrets with this book because honestly, it’s a great read; it reads more of like just a novel or story of how he started Nike but one of the things that really resonated with me specifically because we deal with so many people that have Amazon businesses was how long Nike had problems with cash flow and how long that they were living on the float. And they were living on a very large float where they were writing checks that weren’t in the bank account yet and they were counting on that money being in there. It’s the nature of any growing business especially a physical product business is that the cash flow comes in, you reinvest in the product, you keep growing at a rapid rate. It can be really hard to manage that cash flow. And I know that we talked to Scott Dietz a few weeks ago on forecasting but forecasting doesn’t really matter if you don’t have any cash in the bank and you’re closing the loop on this or kind of continuing this conversation today with Tyler Jefcoat about cash flow forecasting.

Joe: Yeah Tyler and I have been working together off and on with a variety of different clients. Tyler owns Seller Accountant and he’s just a smart guy. He’s built his own company, sold it, and then started any commerce bookkeeping company specifically focused for the most part on his own businesses.

Mark: Is that a phone I hear in the background?

Joe: No, that was not a phone at all. No.

Mark: I figured that you’re so busy people are calling you all the time.

Joe: No, that’s my wife actually. Sorry folks. Sorry. Tyler, yes but the really cool thing about what Tyler does is cash flow forecasting, right? So he does fractional CFO services on top of is bookkeeping services and only for his own clients. And he does in the different levels. He does monthly reviews with some, quarterly reviews of some, and then gets into deeper reviews with others. But the cash flow forecasting model that he went over and shared with me I saw it on another video in a webinar that he did and then I had him show it to me and then he’s sharing it in the show notes of this podcast. It’s a cash flow model along with the video that talks about it and I know going back to my e-commerce days before I sold I did that; I did the float just like Phil Knight, a little smaller level of course.

Mark: But just like Phil Knight.

Joe: Just like Phil Knight, but it was the same thing. You are paying for that inventory with a credit card or you’re just playing the flow and it’s ridiculous. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have a big staff but those that are growing beyond that solopreneur aspect and they have to worry about payroll and things of that nature I think it’s really, really important to focus on cash flow. So Tyler goes over that quite a bit here and the links in the show notes will help anybody that’s having issues in that area.

Mark: These are fantastic tools to put in our war chest of things that we can use as business owners to be able to plan the growth of our businesses. So forecasting is something I’ve been skeptical in the past. Again the conversation with Scott Dietz and my experience with forecasting through his company has really turned me around to this and now I’m super excited to see this because again cash flow forecasting might be one of the most important things in a business as it’s growing.

Joe: It’s important but what else is important? I’ve got to call my wife back so let’s go to the podcast.

Joe: Hey folks Joe Valley here from Quiet Light Brokerage and today well I ranted in the intro with Mark about bookkeeping. I’ve talked to at least 5,000 entrepreneurs over the last seven years and the vast majority of those when it comes to bookkeeping they say I got this and the reality is they don’t. So we’ve got an expert on the podcast here, Tyler Jefcoat from the Seller Accountant. Tyler, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast.

Tyler: Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Joe: I could rant and rave for hours on time about this because it’s the number one reason people don’t sell their businesses or sell them for a heck of a lot less. Somebody said to me the other day Tyler that when they think about their P&Ls they bleed from their eyeballs and I think that sums it up for how a lot of people feel. Alright so as you know on this podcast we don’t do fancy intros, we want to hear from you so tell us about yourself and your business.

Tyler: Yeah, well thanks again for having me. My company is Seller Accountant. I’m coming at this as a guy who sold a health care company about two years ago. We had a good run; zero to a hundred employees in about four years and I was a minority guy and I went through the M&A process and it was interesting. So as we built this accounting firm; I’m an accountant, we really built it around two ideas, Joe. One was we wanted to have a very vertical focus so we only do e-commerce and the second thing is that we want to focus on not just the price of admission of just having clean books but having the ability to use data to drive profitability. So I think that’s why you and I have resonated with each other so well was I want to partner with brokers that really have the best interest of clients at heart and your clients all have the same issues which is we got to have investor great books so we can go to market and so yeah man it’s great to be here.

Joe: Cool. Everybody that’s listening knows how I do feel about the books but I want to go beyond what you do at Seller Accountant. You manage people’s books, you do an incredible job with that, do you streamline it? It’s not expensive. It’s much better for their bottom line than if they had an in-house bookkeeper. There’s no question that that math works but let’s talk about some of the additional services you do. I saw a video where you talked about your fractional CFO services, where you talked about cash flow analysis, Cost of Goods Sold analysis and some of those things. What are the top two or three things that you focus on with clients on I guess is your fractional CFO services that you do that for?

Tyler: It is and is still part of Seller Accountant but in addition to just doing the bookkeeping each month for a bunch of Amazon and other e-commerce sellers we provide a fractional CFO service. And so I think what makes it powerful Joe is that we’re just crazy focused; again we’re crazy focused, my eyes don’t blink when I look at a P&L for e-commerce but I do it all day long. And so our ability to step into somebody’s business and see things differently because we look at it kind of like you do Joe honestly; you’re looking at P&Ls constantly also but then focus on kind of the big things on a macro level. How does a seller really understand how their sales channels are performing over time? So that kind of goes back to the visibility of the book but it’s more important than that, it’s understanding okay, is Amazon the right channel for me to focus on versus Shopify? That’s kind of one of the big discussions. And then we tend to the other kind of macro discussion as you allude to is around cash flow. This is a cash hungry business that we run; this e-commerce retail and a lot of the sellers tend to be undercapitalized meaning they’re not coming to the table with 2 million dollars in free cash to just dump in inventory. And so our ability to understand not just what we think our sales are going to be next year but what we think our actual cost are going to be related to inventory when we’re going to have to spend that money, that’s critical. And so that’s a discussion we have with our clients and then honestly just understand the profitability of our different product lines and SKUs. Those are areas where we can really help our clients not just know what the bottom line is for a given month but help them get the data they need to make better decisions as a CEO.

Joe: And you do this as part of the fractional CFO services. You meet with these clients once a month after you review their P&Ls and you do a deeper dive. Are there other different levels of fractional CFO services where you’re spending more time with some than others; how does it work?

Tyler: Yeah there are and at this point, most of our CFO clients are bookkeeping clients that have chosen to layer on the CFO service. The reason for that is it is very challenging for me to add a lot of value efficiently for you if I don’t understand your books and you just have a really nice way of doing the books. So yes they can choose to have quarterly calls. We have some that will meet even less frequently but it’s basically normally quarterly or monthly. And we have some things in the pipeline that may allow us to just generate some value and it’d be a little bit less can you get on Tyler’s calendar because I think that can be something that can be prohibitive. But at this point, we’ve got a great monthly service, a great quarterly service, and I think maybe it’ll be somewhere around the neighborhood of 70 million dollars in e-commerce sales that I’m responsible for; me and my team for just the CFO side of it this year. And so it gives us an update that we can speak intelligently about what’s happening in the business.

Joe: You must be very expensive then, yes?

Tyler: Oh man we’re so expensive, yeah. No, you know what I mean. I would say we provide extreme value to our clients. And I would just say this we’re not cheap; I don’t want to be cheap, you want the provider that you can partner with us providing superior value. But I will say this we are way less expensive than actually trying to hire somebody. And if we can generate the kind of value that makes your business grow or allows you to get maybe a better multiple when you go to market in a year I don’t think we’re charging nearly enough for that to be honest with you and I love it, man. This is the fun part of the business; it’s really understanding how to help business owners make money. How do we actually turn this pile of work into a profitable business? And so for me, this is kind of what gets me out of bed. So it’s really I’m an accountant, of course, it’s about money; we want to make a living but this is a part of the business I’m passionate about.

Joe: Well let’s talk about some of those individual things you do as the fractional CFO provider. I saw a cash flow forecasting video that you did. This is an enormous problem for e-commerce business owners and a lot of will just go the way of an Amazon loan at 14, 15%. I guess it’s lower when you do the math. But talk to us about the cash flow forecasting that you do for these clients and how that helps them in terms of profitability.

Tyler: Yeah. So when it comes to cash flow forecasting I think where most entrepreneurs stop is they take the time to open a spreadsheet and say what do I think my sales are going to be in the next six months? By the way, I would caution you there, if you ever run a forecast in the future of your business and every month in the future is way more profitable than your last six months of them, there’s a good chance that you are kind of suffering from optimism that happens. All of us entrepreneurs we love running our businesses and we’re like just tomorrow we’re going to make money, now next month that’s going to be wildly profitable.

Joe: You’re delusional. We know that after doing this for so long that there is great years and bad years.

Tyler: You may run into a P&L and somebody hasn’t made money in a year and they’re like but guess what Joe tomorrow we’re going to make money. And so my encouragement is to go ahead and be honest with yourself about how your business is performing and take a minute to say okay based on our seasonality, based on the products we’re going to launch; as the actual owner of these e-commerce businesses you guys are in the best position to guess what your sales are going to be next year and put them in a spreadsheet Expected Sales, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And then if you look at your historical data you can say okay our cost of goods sold, our margins have tended to be at a certain level. And so most entrepreneurs are pretty good at building a forecast around what their operation is going to generate. We kind of know what our overhead is. We kind of know what our advertising budget is going to be. We know if our rent’s going to go up next year. And so you got to do that work but a lot of entrepreneurs stop there and you can’t stop there. Because of the impact of debt and the impact of inventory and the impact frankly of taxes you need to take that operational data and then work it into a full cash flow forecast for maybe the next year or the next six months. And so the way we do it is we take that baseline info that I just mentioned; how much profit are you expecting your operation to generate each month over the next six months or a year. Okay, great, now tell us what your loan payments are going to be, what’s the cash coming out of your business for; for that Amazon loan or for your SBA loan or for your line of credit. Okay great, let’s take that into account each month and then inventory forecasting can be kind of tricky. The more I thought about this I think it just needs to be simple. You have an average amount of days that it takes you to; you’re going to issue a PO and you’re going to get your container sent from China or wherever you’re getting your goods. And so if I have forecasted that in April I’m going to have $30,000 in cost of goods sold then I’m going to have to pay for that $30,000 in inventory probably about 90 days before that. And so if you know what the waiting times are in your inventory you can use your forecast that you just did for your quote-unquote P&L; your profit and loss to basically guess okay I’m going to need to have that 30 grand in the bank in January so that it’s ready to sell in April. And I mean they’re going to have to fund that inventory purchase with some kind of great terms with the supplier or I’m going to have to have a loan, I’m going to have cash in the bank. And so what I advise the clients to do is to kind of what are my inventory purchases going to be? This is not a surprise. It’s going to take a few months to fulfill it. Let’s get that on this cash flow picture and then the other thing that you might consider is if there’s going to be any owner distributions including your CPA may have you take a tax distribution once a quarter to keep Uncle Sam happy. And so this all goes together; your operations, your financing activities, your inventory, and then lastly the investing kind of from your owners and it’s going to give you; it’s not uncommon to have a picture where you expected to make money in the month of January, on paper you have profit but because of your debt payments or because of your purchases of future inventory your cash flow is actually negative for that same month. And so we just blew a spreadsheet; in fact, I’m glad to share it with you. I just have it in a Google Sheet here where we try to understand the impact of all of those factors on cash flow. So if there’s going to be a negative on the sheet I knew it now instead of it being an emergency.

Joe: We’ll link that up so people can use it and try it themselves and then reach out to you for help if they need it. But what’s the impact? You talked about good money at good rates versus bad money at bad rates. So what’s the negative impact if they didn’t do the forecasts and they come up against the month of January and they need to get a loan somewhere; what do you see people do and what’s the drawback of having little to no notice of it?

Tyler: Yeah. So there’s two major impacts. One is if I know that I’m going to run out of cash in six months I can make two important adjustments that I don’t have the luxury of making if I’m right on top of that shortfall. So if I’ve got six months I can cut expenses. If I need to actually lower some overhead if I need to renegotiate my rent if I need to do anything if I need to slow down if I need to go to my suppliers and renegotiate those payment terms. I’ve got some internal leverage. In other words, I know how important it is to me because I know I’m out of money say in April if I don’t figure this out now. The second thing is if I know I’m going to run out of cash in four to six months I’ve bought myself a bunch of time to go find the right kind of loan if I have to pick up some debt on the balance sheet. And just as you alluded to I’ve got six months and have a pretty good business I might be able to get through SBA underwriting, I might be able to get all sorts of favorable lending options but if I wake up and realize oh crud tomorrow I’m out of money I don’t have a lot of options. I’m going to take whatever money is going to fund me in the next week. And I would say that’s where a lot of sellers get in trouble. They haven’t forecasted effectively and so now they’re out of money. They’ve got to fulfill that PO tomorrow and so now they’re in a bind where how are they going to get stuff on the shelves to be able to sell it. And so yeah that’s what I would say to that.

Joe: So on the SBA underwriting, if somebody owns an e-commerce business and they’ve got good financials, they’ve owned it for a while and they use services like yours you’re seeing them able to go out and get SBA financing to help with cash flow of their current business.

Tyler: Yeah I think there’s; I don’t know that I’ve seen; I’ve seen more SBA lending when the deals come together for an actual exit but I will say this if you have a couple of years of good financials and you’re carrying some debt I’ve definitely seen some of our clients refinance other lines of credit using SBA lending once they have a couple of years of good financial history.

Joe: That makes sense.

Tyler: You can go through the underwriting and what ends up happening is the bank has a much lower risk profile because the SBA; the government is going to back a certain percentage of that loan. And so it’s always going to be your best terms, your best interest rate; the underwriting is a bit of a pain but again if you have six months you can get through that process and explore that as an option instead of having to take whatever emergency lending process.

Joe: Yeah for those that don’t understand the terms on the SBA lending it’s generally 10 years and the interest rate is somewhere between 5 ½ to 8 ½%. Compare that to an Amazon loan where the term is somewhere between 14 and 15%; I’m sorry the interest rate and the term is generally 12 months. They take it out of your account as they make deposits.

Tyler: And I’ve seen Amazon be as high as 19, 20 percent and they will underwrite it down to 11 but it never gets anywhere close to touching the SBA.

Joe: Yeah, it’s incredibly convenient. There’s no question about it but there’s a pretty steep cost that comes along with it.

Tyler: The only one that steeper is when you have to get more of what’s called like a payday funding option maybe like a Payability; nothing wrong. It’s a good service in the right context but those cost capital numbers end up getting up in the 25, 30% range if you’re not careful and that can really crush your business.

Joe: Okay, cash flow taking, money off the table, these things are what keep entrepreneurs up at night so I love the fact that you help them with that and we’ll share that in the show notes. Let’s jump on to something that I think is incredibly important when we talk to people about selling their business. Well ultimately we’re going to help them when they’re ready but we’d prefer to talk to them 12 to 18 months in advance so that they’re working with someone like you in order to prepare the best exit possible. And we often talk to them about renegotiating their cost of goods sold, focusing in on those inventories that are hero SKUs and those that are just okay. We always say you can break even doing nothing so why bother but often when it looks like they’re breaking even they lose money. You help them focus in through your fractional CFO services on hero SKUs, cost of goods sold, things of that nature; yes?

Tyler: Yeah I think something that’s really important whether you have a fractional CFO or you do it yourself, it’s extremely important to do a SKU grading. So I don’t even care if you have a thousand skews you have to have some kind of a system for understanding which product lines are successful and which ones are losers. Which ones are the heroes like you said Joe, which ones are duds? And I have been shocked; I’ve been continually shocked as we do these analyses for clients to see that a guy’s favorite SKU is taking them like an 80% advertising budget to move the SKU.

Joe: That doesn’t sound profitable. Yeah.

Tyler: No, that’s bad. Yeah. And just in case you’re wondering, an 80% advertising budget is terrible. But they didn’t know that because it’s buried in this entire pile of SKUs and so it’s extremely important to understand at least occasionally how each of your products is performing so that you can support the good ones, renegotiate the bad ones, or kill them.

Joe: Yeah. So revenue insanity profit; no revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. So it gets down to understanding your profit and loss statements, digging into revenue by SKU, profit by SKU. I get most people don’t get this. A lot of people that I work with that come across like I did early on I tell people openly I fell asleep in accounting class in college. I’ve since had to adapt and learn and now I understand it very, very well. But most people don’t understand the simple difference between cash and accrual accounting and that when you’re selling a business the books need to be presented on an accrual basis. Can you describe the difference between the two in layman’s terms? That’s the challenge; layman’s terms.

Tyler: Sure. So simply put if you have cash going out of your business, say you’re buying inventory to actually stroke the check and you have a deposit coming into your business say the deposit from Amazon and you book that sale when the cash hits your account and you book that expense when you pay the money that’s called cash basis accounting. And from a compliance tax standpoint, for most small businesses that is acceptable. But here’s the problem and you got anyone who’s looked at their P&L and saw a negative gross profit for a month. When you look at there and say why did I sell $100,00 this month but all of a sudden had $200,000 of inventory expenses? That doesn’t make any rational sense. The reason is that you book the entire inventory the day you stroke the check instead of having the inventory asset and expensing it slowly as you sell the goods. And so in an accrual accounting method, you are on a quest to attach the sales dollar to the expenses that are associated with that dollar. So if I sold; let’s just use that same number, if I sold $100,000 on Amazon in November I want to know how much it actually cost me; what the actual inventory expense for those units were that I sold in that month. And so you can kind of tell me and hear me say it’s a little more difficult. Getting good accrual books takes a little bit more work. You have to deal with receivables. You’ve got to book things a little bit more sophisticatedly but it’s the only way to be able to answer the question Joe did I make money last month? Because if you’re doing it on a cash basis you really have no idea. You know when you’ve made your investments but you don’t actually know whether your business is profitable unless you have an accrual system.

Joe: And is that something that; I know it’s hard to set up in Quick Books online but what do people have to have? Their landed cost of goods sold or their cost of goods sold the freight might be separate in your P&Ls; is it something that a layman could set up and figure out and flip to or does it really take a tremendous amount of experience like you have?

Tyler: Well it could. I mean I don’t want to; let me just say it’s worth the effort. I will say this for everyone who’s listening to this to this podcast if you haven’t explored a tool called A2A accounting; literally the letter A, the number 2, the letter A. So A2A Accounting, I think it’s A2Aaccounting.com that is a tool that lets you kind of pre map Amazon journal entries and it makes doing the accruals a lot easier. Well, what makes e-commerce so challenging is that Amazon pays us every 14 days normally and some of those sales might have happened in one month but I’m getting the entire paycheck from Amazon in the next month. And so I would say Joe yes normally having somebody that really understands e-commerce accounting is very helpful but for smaller sellers or sellers who don’t have the budget to hire a team like mine it’s worth learning how to do it and it’s worth trying to understand; you mentioned the term landed cost of goods sold if I spend $100,000 on inventory, I’ve stroke the check, I’ve sent the wire, I have that inventory now, it’s really important that I try to understand what that fully landed value is per unit. So let’s say I bought a thousand of a particular SKU I can’t just say I spent $100,000 divided by 1,000 so I’ve got basically was that a dollar SKU, right? It doesn’t work that way.

Joe: Because you pay the extra 10 cents to ship each individual unit; yeah.

Tyler: Yeah you got shipping, tariffs, duties, everything else you need to just do the math. Make sure you have a spreadsheet; call it kind of a Master SKU Spreadsheet and understand what it really costs you per unit to get your product to the customer. And that’s probably one of the biggest keys to understand.

Joe: And let me just put some reality to this in terms of the why. Look anybody out there listening is like why the hell do I need to do that? The reason is because eventually, you’re going to sell your business. You’re going to get bought out. You’re going to sell it to a partner. You and your partner are going to get in a fight and you’re going to want to move in different directions. Or you own it with your wife or husband and you’re going to get a divorce or at least half of you are. Or you’re going to die. It’s all going to happen eventually so you need to have your numbers on an accrual basis because when you sell your physical products e-commerce business you’re going to get paid a multiple of your seller’s discretionary earnings plus the landed cost of good sellable inventory on hand at the time of closing. Landed. If you’re not tracking that landed figure and you’re paying an extra 50 cents per unit you could be losing tens of thousands of dollars in inventory value at the sale. The other thing in terms of cash versus accrual and doing it yourself versus hiring somebody like Tyler is that if you’re off by a couple of percentage points; let’s just say that you’re spending a million dollars a year in revenue. It’s not a small business, it’s a sizable one. And I’ve talked to these people that do this and have in-house bookkeepers and I’ll give you some math on why you shouldn’t admit it but if you’re off by 2% on a million bucks that’s $2,000 right? That’s not right; that’s $20,000 that you’re off by. Your business is probably sizable selling it 4, 4 ½ times that would mean that your numbers; your profit, your discretionary earnings are off by $20,000. The value of your business is $80,000 off if you’re a four-time multiple. So you’re either overpricing the business by 80,000 because you overestimated or underestimated your cost of goods sold or worse yet you’re undervaluing your business because you’re off by 2% and your business is worth $80,000 more than you’ve got it listed for. These things matter. You worked so damn hard on driving more revenue and looking at your bottom line. But if you don’t get the details right like this you’re just wasting a whole bunch of money. Okay, that’s my momentary rant now I’m going to go into another one. The services that you provide Tyler and there are others out there like you that’s just like there’s other brokers out there besides Quiet Light; it is what it is but I talked to somebody last week, they spent $24,000 a year on an in-house bookkeeper just out of college that does everything the CPA tells her to do. The numbers are all wrong. They’re recording deposits; it was on a cash basis, it was completely and utterly incorrect. And this person thought they were doing something like 1.2 million in discretionary earnings, it really was about 800,000. If they fired the bookkeeper; we’ll do the quick math for everybody, fire your bookkeeper is my message, $24,000 a year, hire somebody that does the e-commerce bookkeeping like Tyler and Seller Accountant, even if it’s let’s call it 600 bucks a month and you’re doing an all-encompassing service it’s only $7,200 a year, right? So 24,000 minus the 7,200, it’s $16,800 in annual savings to the bottom line numbers of your business. If your business is worth four times that adds $67,000 to the list price of your business when you eventually sell it. It’s simple and logical math and you don’t have an HR problem anymore; you don’t have that bookkeeper in-house, you’ve got somebody like Tyler helping you who’s a Bulldogs fan by the way. For those watching the video, stand up just a little bit; what’s that logo on your shirt say?

Tyler: Man I’m a University of Georgia guy. I’m across the street from the campus here in Athens and Double Dog. I have my MBA and accounting degree here. Joe, I will say this it really is it’s not even so much what you could pay per hour because, to be honest with you the client that’s doing a million in discretionary earnings is unlikely to be 600 bucks a month for any service even me if we’re getting it done right. But the reality is that if you’re paying someone your full-time salary; I know this when I had a company with 100 employees. We always had somebody sitting around. If you’re going to carry someone you’re always having to get them at a rate where you can’t use their full capacity or frankly if you’re using your full capacity you got to hire somebody else. And so it’s inefficient because; and there are some businesses that need to have a full-time controller. I think if you’re doing 15 million a year in revenue you probably need to have a high-end controller on your staff. At that point, that’s a six-figure job you’re looking to hire for. I think the issue that the seller may be that you’re describing would come across is not only are they spending the 24,000; even if they paid me the same amount to do it it’s actually going to be done correct and when I go to market those books are going to be stated in accrual basis and they’re going to have everything the way they want it. And we can scale with them without them having to hire an entire new employee. So I think that really is a big benefit unless you are; this is what I’ve learned in general. And this is every business I’ve worked in or own, I want to make sure that I inhouse my core competency; whatever my competitive advantage is I’m going to make sure that I have teammates that allow me to perpetuate that competitive advantage. Anything that isn’t my strength I want to find someone that that is their strength; someone that can do it more efficiently and can do it better than I can. I’m not a broker if I need a broker I want to go to someone like Joe that gets the broker business and can do it more efficiently I’m going to pay Joe but I’m going to make a lot of mistakes and lose a lot more money if I try to do it myself. It’s really the same with accounting or PPC or anything else. I’m a big believer. That’s what my dad always told me. It’s just spend your time where you’re making your money. I want to get so focused that I can be the best in the world at something and then I want to outsource as much as I can so that I can be better at my core rather than trying to fix my errors all the time and fix my screw-ups and that kind of thing.

Joe: I think that’s incredibly well said. I don’t have a whole lot to add to that. I think it’s just brilliant. I think it’s a great business methodology and mindset and it’s what everybody should be adopting. Tyler, how do the audience members learn more about your services?

Tyler: Yeah so thanks again for having me, Joe. So SellerAccountant.com is our website. You can learn more about our services there. Feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to have a discussion with you. And yes it’s been a pleasure to being on the show.

Joe: And you’re going to share that cash flow forecasting spreadsheet. We’ll put that in the show notes so everybody can do their own numbers and if it’s confusing reach out to Tyler he’d be there to help you. Thanks for the honor man, I appreciate it.

Tyler: You got it.

Links and Resources:

  continue reading

335 episodes

All episodes

×
 
Loading …

Welcome to Player FM!

Player FM is scanning the web for high-quality podcasts for you to enjoy right now. It's the best podcast app and works on Android, iPhone, and the web. Signup to sync subscriptions across devices.

 

Quick Reference Guide