Join other young entrepreneurs, mentors and other professionals across the globe and participate in this exciting conversation about successful businesses. Ask questions, seek advice or just network! This is a great opportunity and we hope you can join – #ybichat!

As a country host of Global Entrepreneurship Week 2011, the Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF) is vying for the Buzz Builder Award which will be presented at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Liverpool, England in March 2012. We need you to help us win the award and share the inspiration of GEW Canada campaign.

The three easy steps to help CYBF win the Buzz Builder Award:

1. Visit the blog post From grassroots to rooftops: GEW 2011 makes Canada shine.
2. LIKE, TWEET and SHARE it before Thursday, March 1^st, 2012! Be sure to use the share buttons on the blog post title to make your participation count.
3. Remind others in your network to LIKE, TWEET and SHARE it too to help us create as much buzz as we can.

Managing Corporate Culture article series

In my last article, Creating a compelling vision and related values, I described the key aspects of drafting vision and missions statements and corporate values. How you communicate these items effectively to your managers and the rest of your employees becomes as important as the words themselves.

The golden rule of effective communication is:

Not just delivering the message but also ensuring that it the receiver understands it in the way that the sender intended it to be.  Further, with respect to the vision and values, the CEO should be front and centre.

Some universal guidelines regarding corporate communication of any kind are as follows:

1. Receive input from your key managers regarding the content of the message.
2. Confirm that their understanding of the intent and content of the message is the same as yours. A common communication mistake is the sender assumes that by merely presenting the message the receiver will understand it in exactly the same way as the sender does. This rarely happens so it is imperative that you have your key managers describe to you their understanding of the message. You can then identify where the differences are, correct them, and minimize these differences when you communicate the message to all of your employees. For critical messages, it is useful to pick some non-management personnel and go through the same exercise with them prior to releasing the communication.
3. It is imperative that your managers/supervisors are on the same page as you regarding the objectives, content and understanding of any message. As mentioned in an earlier article if your managers do not eat, breathe and believe the company’s key initiatives (and messages) the messages will not be successful.
4. Determine how best to communicate to all employees – i.e. which people should deliver the message, where and when. This will, to a great extent, be dictated by the geographic and organizational structure of your company. Ensure that anyone delivering key communication is properly coached and prepared and you have confidence that they will do it properly. Proper corporate communication is a priority to building culture – most managers need improvement and help when communicating key corporate information.
5. After the message is communicated, have managers check with a sample of non-management employees to ensure the message was properly understood.

In my company we used our marketing person to help draft corporate communication. We also prepared PowerPoint slides to facilitate the managers’ presentations and observed their presentations in order to provide feedback on how to improve.

Should have any questions or feedback regarding the content of this article please email me (Terry Thompson) at tesh@shaw.ca

• Plan ahead to save time and money down the road – Taking a moment early in the year to sort out your budget and list all of your expected expenses will help you create a road map for your financial success and prevent any surprises along the way.
• Stick with it – Budgets only work if you follow them. It’s easy to be tempted by the newest software or gadget, but before you shell out money you hadn’t planned on, ask yourself if it is really necessary for your business. Overspending will only give you headaches later.
• Cash is king – Especially if you work on contract, the timing at which you send out the invoice may not be the same as when you receive the payment. Taking time to project your cash flow from month to month, both in terms of revenue and expenses (this is where a good budget comes in), will save you from any unexpected shortfalls.
• Keep a ‘rainy day’ fund – No matter how good your budget is, something inevitably comes up that is beyond your control. You can still plan for the unexpected by including a contingency buffer in your budget every year.
• Avoid ‘shoebox accounting’ – Detailed and up-to-date bookkeeping will help you keep track of your budget, project your cash flow and let you see where your money is going every month. It will also make you your accountant’s favourite client. Good accounting software doesn’t have to set you back a bundle either. Wave Accounting (www.waveaccounting.com) is a free online accounting program that is simple to use and compatible with Canadian taxes. They’ve just recently added a payroll function that will increase its versatility.
• Stay Organized – Even with detailed and accurate books, you still need to keep the records of your expenditures and revenue. Reduce your accountant’s workload, and ultimately your bill, by filing your receipts in categories that match those you are using in your bookkeeping.

Click here to find out more about Heather Hinam and Second Nature Adventures in Discovery.

There is a philosophy that says, in business, ‘the customer is the king’. Your business is created to serve your customers’ needs and wants. As such, no customers means no money (cash) and no business. The cash can be in form of immediate cash-at-hand or accounts receivable, which is convertible to cash as soon as the debt is paid.

Cash is the lifeblood of a business. The financial statement that records cash transactions is called the cash flow statement. It shows a detailed or summarized report of the inflow and outflow of cash in a business during a trading or accounting period.A cash flow statement is one of the key financial statements for efficient business financial management. A negative net cash flow is usually presented in parenthesis (xxxxx). This means that the business’ expenses exceeded its income during the transaction period. A positive net cash flow shows the reverse.

Basically, the cash flow statement is a lending/borrowing and investment instrument and critical when the business is seeking funds for business operations or needs capital to grow. From the cash flow statement and its underlying assumptions, an expert, investor or lender can quickly understand and predict the business manager’s spending behavior and ability to make good financial decision in cash management. A healthy cash flow is a key indicator that the business is being properly managed by a healthy entrepreneur.

It’s important for the entrepreneur or business owner to have a good understanding of how to prepare and interpret a cash flow statement.If you feel you could enhance your knowledge of cash flow statements, check out online resources or talk to experts. Make sure you know the language, content, implications of your business numbers, and also understand the messages that your cash flow statement is conveying to others.

Cathy Yeomans, Imagine Public Relations, White Rock, BC, imaginepr@shaw.ca

If you pay someone else to do your taxes, keep some money in your pocket by preparing ahead of time. Here are some tips to keep you on track:

1. Instead of organizing your financials by category, do it by month. Then your bills, expenses and monthly financials are together and easily relate.
2. Keep a good mileage log book. Take your odometer reading at the beginning and end of the year. Then by tracking your business mileage, you take the difference to come up with the percentage of car expenses that can be claimed.
3. Set up a separate account for all taxes and CPP. After a taxable income of $3,500, you will need to pay CPP to the government. So don’t scramble for the money at year-end and just pay it from your “tax” account.
4. Look for resources to help. Many accountants that run their own small businesses are more than willing to provide advice and assistance, especially with the little details. Those details just might save you a lot of money!

• CYBF welcomed our Board Members from across Canada to our AGM this week. We have some new members! Check and find out more about them here!
• The countdown begins for the #GEC2012 in Liverpool, UK next month. Richard Branson is scheduled to speak and CYBF will be there representing @GEWCanada! Find out more info today.
• Great articles we received from our CYBF Mentors:
• If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – Tips on measuring your business from CYBF mentor Christiana Mbazigwe
• Elements that all financial spreadsheets should include – By Simon Selkrig, Strategize Financial Modelling
• Tax season is here! Do you have financial or accounting questions for your business that you need to ask an expert about? Ask the experts at CYBF’s Entrepeer Hub Subgroups on LinkedIn.
• What’s happening in Alberta? There is a free 6 part business plan series for entrepreneurs in Calgary! Starting on March 6 @ 6 PM, sign up now !

Thanks for checking in with us this week and we hope you have a safe and wonderful LONG weekend!

CYBF Team

As a business owner or entrepreneur, measurement of business performance is critical for effective and efficient management. You must determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you set standards as well as monitor and evaluate your business outcomes. This ultimately helps you attain your goals.

For a goal to be SMART, it must be measurable. Business, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, is a game of numbers. Remember that there is a message behind the numbers.

For example, by answering the following questions, you will generate meaningful understanding of a person. What’s your age, height, weight, blood pressure, temperature, shoe size, eye or hair color, etc?

For the business, what are the sales volumes, revenues, expenses, profit per month or year, start-up cost, number of employees, etc? The answers to all these questions provide measures for the management of a particular component of the business. The data derived from the measurements can be summarized in quantitative or qualitative form. The qualitative can be coded and expressed in quantitative form, if desired.

In the non-profit sector, measuring the outcomes of programs and services is crucial to continue receiving funding from sponsors. This requires accurate, timely and up-to-date records of performance. Besides funding, measurement is also useful for effective projection, planning and management of activities.

The same applies to the business sector, where adequate record keeping, measurement and accountability are all imperative. As such, performance measurement is critical for performance management.

In short, “if you can’t measure it [outcomes], you can’t manage it”. And failure to measure and manage your business outcomes will have serious implications on the health of your business. Avoid problems by learning about and implementing performance measurement and management practices today!

The creation of a financial spreadsheet or model may seem a daunting task for most. It is important to write a game plan or have an idea about the information output requirements for users. That way you will better understand your information needs.

A base financial spreadsheet or model should have the following:

• Cover and Table of Contents. Cover worksheet to state the nature of the spreadsheet. i.e. XYZ Inc., 2012 Budget, and the Table of Contents worksheet should list all the worksheets in your workbook; with hyperlinks that enables users to click directly to the specific worksheet i.e. Income Statement. See image here.

• Assumptions. These worksheets will contain the data entry or number crunching, such as the time series information (financial year end), company specific information such as the name of the subsidiary, assets or projects.

• Calculations. The detailed calculation of all financial numbers will be undertaken here. Some of the information will be taken from the Assumptions and Model Import (see below) worksheets and presented in a succinct and audit-friendly way. See image here.

• Output Summary and Dashboards. A high-level presentation of the financial numbers on one worksheet, coupled with the use of graphical charts to depict the drivers of financial returns. See image here.

• Model Imports. The sole repository of all external spreadsheet referencing, which the financial spreadsheet will reference in the Assumptions or Calculations worksheet.

• Ancillary worksheets, Checks and Lookup worksheets. There should be a separate worksheet, similar to the idea of the Table of Contents, which should summarise or Error or Alert Checks in the spreadsheet. An example of an Error Check would be the computed Net Profit after Tax (NPAT) equals the number sourced from a company’s database, and is warehoused in the Model Import worksheet. An Alert Check would ensure that Fixed Assets (Net) on the Balance is not negative.

The Lookup worksheet stores in the customized tables for drop-down inputs in the financial model, for example a lookup table with the months of the year, which is used in the Assumptions worksheet to stipulate the financial year-end of the financial spreadsheet.

As I discussed in 10 ways to improve your financial spreadsheets, it is vital to keep things uniform, simple and concise. There are two prime factors why stakeholders of a financial spreadsheet or model send it to the scrap-heap; even after someone has spent a lot of time developing the spreadsheet. First, users may not understand how the spreadsheet works and where it is sourcing information from. Adopt a logical process flow with a user guide, and place all external sources in the Model Import worksheets.

Second, users may not trust financial outputs, i.e. they may view the spreadsheet to be an audit risk. Once again a user guide would help, but more importantly implementing comprehensive Error and Alert checks across the spreadsheet, would both mitigate against such audit risk concerns.

The development of a financial spreadsheet or model should be kept simple, clear and concise. The user should be able to readily understand the spreadsheet, and refer to a user guide, if need be. Users of the spreadsheet must have total confidence in the calculated outputs of the spreadsheet. Hence there should be a comprehensive roll-out of error and alert checks to verify and validate outputs across the financial model or spreadsheet.