Whittaker & Company is here to help businesses affected by the COVID-19 crisis. The Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) has released several useful resources related to programs the Small Business Administration (SBA) is administering to assist businesses during this challenging time. In the links below you will find the AICPA’s tools as well
Author Archives: Whittaker
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The economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic is starving many businesses of cash. The crisis has radically disrupted the flow of payments that usually lubricates the interconnected world of business. Especially impacted are smaller firms that rely on revenue from a few customers to balance the books at the end of each month. A surprising
Many of our clients have taken advantage of the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). PPP loans are providing essential relief to businesses that might otherwise be forced to cut staff, or worse. With the cash in hand, now is the time to understand how the loan should be treated for accounting and tax
Many business owners know that they need more sales, better cash flow and higher profits, but they don’t know what drives those results or necessarily the quickest path to get there. My assessment is that you need to know what matters in order to achieve you goals timely. Your sales typically come from two areas:
For several years I have heard successful business leaders say that profits are earned on the margin, meaning that profit is earned on the outskirts of your business, or not necessarily on the core of your offering. It could be your competitive advantage, your unique core differentiator, or your value added product or service that
A while back, I listened to a leadership podcast and the topic of the episode was ‘Questions Good Leaders Ask’. The speaker stated “the questions we ask communicate our values and what is important to us.” This is true at work and at home. As the leader of a business, group, team, family, etc., you
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How are you progressing toward the plans you set for your business this year? Most all business owners and management teams start each year with a set of goals/objectives they intend to achieve for the year. Those goals/objectives are supported by strategies, and those strategies are supported by action plans. Now that we’re about one-third of
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A while back, I read an article in the Harvard Business Review titled A Radical Prescription for Sales, exploring the possibility that compensating salespeople with the traditional commission model is based more on tradition than logic, and the model can sometimes do more harm than good to a business by hindering growth and limiting profits.
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I have studied Value Propositions in Michael Porter’s Five Forces framework and in Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy. In Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne suggest moving beyond the bloody waters where the sharks are and developing core differentiators that the marketplace cannot compete with. In one of my all-time favorite books,
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In one of my all-time favorite business books, Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur , they discuss the key resources that drive business. I really enjoy this topic because it speaks not only to the financial assets that a company owns, but also to the non-financial resources as well. Many accountants understand