On The Gross Profit Podcast, we often focus on explaining and analyzing ideas that can help your business bring in more profit. Today, we’re shifting our focus to talk about what these issues look like on a daily basis.
Garret Carragher will share some of his experiences wrapping up the old year and preparing for the new one, and James Kennedy will reflect on the lessons learned on a trip to a conference. Through it all, they offer their perspective on how issues arise in the real work of procurement and how to respond in the moment.
On this episode you’ll hear:
- The importance of doing random stock takes
- How to deal with retention
- Lessons from attending a business conference
- Profit concerns as you end one year and begin a new one
If you’re interested in how the issues we talk about manifest in day to day life, then this is one episode you won’t want to miss.
The Importance Of Doing Random Stock Takes
Garret is very familiar with the importance of random stock takes. Stock can get misplaced, become obsolete, be damaged, not be received and it can also disappear.
Garret had a stock check done recently and a number of issues were identified that now need to be tackled. It was hard to figure out where items had gone, if they had even been received and the worst part was that one person hadn’t even been billed for something! In Garret’s opinion, a lot of the time, when something hasn’t been billed, it actually doesn’t mean the stock has been stolen, but that the person whose job it was to take care of the stock billing didn’t do it properly.
Sometimes you can have a very well-meaning employee who will delay billing someone until they feel like an issue the customer has reported has been addressed. This might sound like a nice idea, but it’s counterproductive when they forget to bill them when that issue has been resolved.
Attending A Business Conference
At a business conference James went to this week, he gave away approximately 100 Profit Leaks books There were around 1,000 stands at the conference, so there were a lot of people there. It had free access, which means anyone could go and it also means it was very generic. There were a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs, people wanting to start a business and students. There was a mix of people, and we put up our stand, my equipment stand. James had a nice video explaining what we do, produced by his wife at Piehole.TV, explaining our video company. We had a nice poster of our app and how it shows you how you can manage budgets in real time. We also had a panel dedicated to the book Profit Leaks, and the book definitely got interest.
Profit Concerns For The New Year
With the big customers it is also a PLC, so when your big customers have the powers of PLC, what they always do at the end of the year is they won’t pay you because they need to hit a cash target. In anticipation of the New Year, Garret has been emailing all of the managers, telling them to invoice as much as they could, to collect as much cash as they could, and to get all of their invoices out by the end and middle of November, because once they had hit December, they probably won’t pay. They’re going to hit this cash balance, and no matter what they tell people, if they are short on money, they hit their balance for their shareholders.
We hope you enjoyed this episode and make sure to comment by clicking on the orange below!
Resources
Free Chapter of “Profit Leaks” by James Kennedy and Garret Carragher
