The Acumen Podcast

In this episode, Nick and Scott from Acumen talk about some critical areas where most companies are not getting good information. Inventory Accuracy, Preventative Maintenance, Maintence Costs, Profit Centers and Budget vs. Actuals are all places where most decision makers do not know the entire story about what is really happening. It doesn’t need to be that way. A little bit of planning and some process tweaks can often lead to much better infomation and better information will lead to better decisions.

Transcript:

NJN: Do you know the things that you don’t know? Do you realize that a few small changes can often leads to a big impact on the bottom line?

NJN: Welcome to today’s Acumen podcast.
Five Critical Questions that Most Decision Makers Can’t Answer

SDH: The vision that Nick and I have for a podcast is to talk about topics that we see organizations facing every day. Our hope is to get our audience thinking about critical areas where they can improve their businesses. The first series of topics that we are going to dig into are areas that we see companies are often not getting good information. Not getting this information may lead to incorrect or delayed decisions and cost money. Real money.

NJN: It’s all about the money, right?

SDH: Of course. We always say that business is the game and that accounting is the way that you keep score.

NJN: If you are not keep the right score, not keeping score in enough detail, not looking at the score inning by inning and from one at-bat to the next (if you don’t mind a small baseball metaphor) you might be making bad decisions.

SDH: We all make the best decisions that we can based on the information that we have at the time.
That’s fair, that’s smart, and that’s easily justifiable.

NJN: That’s also a bit incomplete.

SDH: Can you explain what you mean by that?

NJN: Sure, In our businesses, we can affect what information that we have available to us. With a little bit planning, maybe some small change to some business process, it is often possible to collect better and more timely information.

NJN: Over the years we have worked with hundreds of companies. We sit down and talk with the owners. We sit down and help them analyze their business.

SDH: We have found that we have been able to group a lot of the ways that we have been able to help companies become more profitable into 5 key areas.

NJN: The areas more often than not decisions makers to not have correct or complete information.

NJN: A lot of the decision makers that we talk with do a fantastic job with some or even most of these questions and thus have a pretty successful business, but in all cases having the information to provide answers to all 5 questions can significantly impact the bottom line.

SDH: Area number one is : Inventory Accuracy.
What is in my warehouse? Discussion Physical Counts vs. Cycle Counts. We will share some common mistakes as well as some best practices.

NJN: Number Two: Preventative Maintenance
How do you know when to service your equipment before it’s too late?

SDH: Number Three: Maintenance Costs
How much does actually cost to keep a piece of equipment running?

NJN: Number Four: Profit Centers
Companies used profits centers to break apart different business part of their business as if they were stand-alone companies.

SDH: Number Five: Budget vs. Actual
It’s important to plan out both your revenues and expenditures for the coming period.

SDH: Over the next series of podcasts we are going to dig into the specifics of these 5 different areas. We will go through some real world examples for each of these 5 key areas and tips on how to answer these questions for your business.

SDH: Hopefully, we get you thinking about your business and ways to improve what you do.
In some cases you may need to track some additional data. In other cases, you may just tweak some reports.
Please stay tuned.

NJN: For Scott Halliday, I’m Nick Nabozny and we’d like to say thanks for listening and as always we’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to leave us some feedback in the comments section or give us a call at 407-965-2411 to discuss your situation.