As our businesses grow and our schedules fill with serving clients, it’s easy to overlook how our personal financial needs might have changed. Here are eight best-practice tips of millionaire business owners and how they personally protect their wealth.

1. Move your money from banks to brokerage accounts.

Instead of having their money tied up at banks, most affluent individuals hold brokerage accounts at investment companies. The advantage is that you can more easily invest excess cash in fairly low-risk interest- or dividend-bearing investments such as bonds. Many multi-millionaire use their brokerage accounts as checking accounts.

The bottom line is your money should always be working for you. Make sure you don’t have huge amounts of cash lying around earning no interest. It’s harder these days to get a good interest rate, but not impossible, and every little bit helps.

2. Protect yourself with insurance.

Are you fully covered for every contingency that could happen, and if not, are you willing to shoulder the risk? Just a few of the types of policies to consider include:

1. Personal: home, auto, health, disability, dental, life, umbrella, and many more.
2. Business: property and casualty, business services liability, director’s and officer’s liability, worker’s compensation, business interruption, auto, non-owned auto if you have employees driving for you using their own cars, health insurance for workers, life insurance for officers, and many more.

Meeting with an insurance professional who can perform a risk audit can help make sure you are aware of any coverage holes, especially if your business has grown significantly or your needs have changed.

3. Keep more of what you make.

There’s nothing wrong with paying the least amount of taxes that are legally required. The fourth quarter is when to make most of your tax-saving moves, so don’t wait until March or April when it could be too late.

Make sure you have a great tax adviser, and reach out to them at least once a quarter for ideas on how to keep more of what you make.

4. Hire slow, fire fast.

You’ve probably heard it before, but it’s more important than ever. It’s a good idea to run extensive background checks on all new hires (and current employees as well if you haven’t done so). A criminal background check is essential, and I’d recommend running employment verification, social security number match, education verification, and social media search.

If your state laws allow it, I recommend running a credit check too. Risk of fraud becomes real when three things are present: 1- opportunity due to poor cash controls (which is more common in small businesses), 2- dire need, which has grown exponentially lately as life savings have been depleted and borrowing has increased, and 3- rationalization in the employee’s mind. You can really only control number one, but with a credit check and where it’s allowed by law, you can see if number two is present. Be careful, though; in many states, it’s illegal to make hiring decisions based on credit checks if the person won’t directly be handling money.

5. Create a bright future.

Pay your future self out of the earnings you make today. Set up a retirement plan so that you can maximize deductions and ensure a comfortable future for yourself.

6. Make it easy on your heirs.

It’s never a good time to think about what will happen after you’re gone. But especially if you run a business, you’ll want to not only have a succession plan in place, you’ll want to make sure someone knows enough about your operations to be able to slip in to do an orderly shutdown, a sale, or continue operations. Something as simple as not knowing your passwords and pins or where all of your accounts or contracts are can wreak havoc on your grieving loved ones, not to mention business operations.

If your personal will is not up to date and your circumstances have changed, then it’s time to revisit documents such as your medical instructions, organ donation wishes, burial preferences, and the like. Gruesome, yes. But imagine these two scenarios: 1- your grieving family and they don’t have a clue where anything is, what to do next, what you wanted, and the confusion that exacerbates the grief, and scenario 2- your grieving family who has a clear checklist of where everything is, who to call for help, what to do next, and exactly what your wishes were in these emotional times. Which one would you wish on your loved ones?

7. Pay attention to your numbers.

I hear it over and over again: the people who become millionaires are clearly on top of their operational numbers. They know their business by the numbers, inside and out.

A good accountant can help you develop the systems and reports you need to stay close to your numbers like the millionaires do. Let us know how we can help you with this.

8. Pay it forward.

When you’ve been successful, you can decide if you want to support causes that are near to your heart. This might mean helping people in need that you can relate to, volunteering, or simply providing a big tip to wait staff. People who are highly successful often create their own foundations and nonprofit organizations so that they can become champions of causes they believe strongly about.

How did you measure up on the eight tips to fiscal responsibility? If you know you have some work to do, mark it on your calendar, break it down into small manageable steps, and get started on building or protecting your financial prosperity. If we can help in any way, please feel free to call us.

A colleague of mine recently brought this to my attention. The early snowstorm in the Northeast a few weeks ago reminded her of the city of Yekaterinburg, a large city two hours east of Moscow by air that often sees snow in October all the way through May. The western border of Siberia is a few hundred miles to the east. In Yekaterinburg, there are many small businesses whose owners need to keep their accounting books just like you do. However there are a couple of twists as you might imagine.

The old Russian accounting system was built for one purpose: to calculate taxes. And the tax system is complicated, expensive, and volatile. In the 1990s, about 600 new laws were published every year (just in case we think U.S is the only country that has a crazy tax system). The Russian government has broad powers to garnish business accounts, and many transactions are handled in cash to avoid this capability. As a matter of fact, it was quite common for small businesses to maintain three sets of books:

• One “official” set of books for the government.
• One for payroll which was mostly done in cash.
• One for management to see what was really going on.

It’s interesting to see whether QuickBooks could handle such data requirements. At any rate, it would need to be QuickBooks in Cyrillic to support the Russian alphabet. Microsoft Excel is definitely available in Cyrillic; I’m not sure Intuit has any plans for a Cyrillic version any time soon, which brings up another challenge: there are not too many plug and play accounting systems available in Russian.

Another challenge in the new, turbulent post-perestroika economy — inflation. Lending rates ranged between 130% and 200%. That’s pretty brutal to profit margins. What’s worse, a loan has to be paid back in three months. A company needing cash for several months is forced to find a new bank every three months to pay off the old loan and lend it the money for the next three months.

Until 1992, Yekaterinburg was a closed city: No foreigners were allowed to visit for reasons of national security. Concepts that we take for granted in America, such as profit and efficiency, are relatively unknown in Russia. There is no Russian word for “efficiency.” Imagine describing efficiency to an employee who has never heard of the concept or the word.

The chief accountant, who is often a company officer, is usually educated as an economist, which is the closest profession that Russia has to accounting until recently. There is a great hunger for management accounting and reporting because there wasn’t anything like it.

Sometimes it’s a breath of fresh air to experience a new perspective. In the U.S. we don’t have to keep three sets of books; one is quite enough for most of us. It’s illegal to make payroll in cash in most states. We have about half a million CPAs and far more bookkeepers to help us with anything we don’t understand. Most of them are quite efficient, and that’s a lot to be grateful for.

If we can help you with anything that feels foreign to you in your accounting system, please call on us anytime.

Do your prospects sometimes balk when you quote your prices?  Do you feel you’re losing business because your fees are too high?  The problem might not be your prices; it might be the way you’re presenting them to potential clients.   Many business owners blame a lost sale on price, but only a small percentage of customers are truly price-sensitive and will make a decision based on price alone.   That means the majority of the market buys on value, not price, and that’s what we need to move the focus to when we present prices.

The following are six ideas to help you reduce fee resistance and possibly even raise prices without receiving objections about your fees.   The overall key is to reduce the prospect’s risk of doing business with you while increasing the chances that they will look like a hero after they have hired you. [Read more…]

You might have routines and systems to help a new employee settle in, such as payroll forms and training manuals.  You might also have some procedures set up for when you start doing business with new vendors, such as asking them for their tax ID paperwork and having them submit invoices to your standards.  But what about onboarding new clients?  Most entrepreneurs don’t think about systematizing that process.

You will save a ton of time if you stop and put some systems in place to help you and your new client get off to an efficient start.  The payoff can be extremely high.  If you save a half hour per client and you have 100 new clients a year, then you just saved 50 hours a year, or an hour a week. [Read more…]

Is finding enough time to do everything you need to do one of your top five small business challenges?  If so, you’re not alone; just about every entrepreneur lists “time” as a challenge they face today in running their businesses.  It’s not uncommon to feel stressed and overwhelmed at everything you need to do.

Plenty of time management books will help you use your time more productively, but who has time to read a whole book these days?  Instead, here are some quick tips to help you work smarter, ease any stress, and tame the time monster.

The 4 “D”s

You might have seen a strategy that allows you to evaluate how to handle each task or e-mail as it comes across your desk.  Here’s mine:   1. Do,  2. Delegate,  3.  Delete, and  4. Delay. [Read more…]

Restaurants do it beautifully.  “Did you leave any room for dessert or coffee?”

The All-Important Upsell

How does your company rate when it comes to the all-important upsell?  Is it smooth like a restaurant waitress who smiles while she delivers her line? Or could it be improved?

The essence of a good upsell is to fully serve your clients needs in a way that helps them and boosts your revenue.  Here are five tips to perfect and track the all-important upsell.

1. Make sure you are upselling.

Once people have chosen to do business with you, you have their trust.  They’ll want to know what else you have to offer.   Sometimes we may feel like we’re bugging the client, but it’s really cheating your client not to let them know what else you can help them with. [Read more…]