I’m a creative person, and can sometimes be too creative. When I started my website for my business, nothing seemed to turn out the way I envisioned it or run the way the way it should. Why? I could not let go of the fact that I was not a web designer and couldn’t do it all. Being a designer and a creative individual are two totally different things. I spent countless hours on learning to build a website instead of hiring someone with the skill and working on other things that needed to get done.

I learned quickly that I needed employees with strengths where I didn’t, so that there would be balance in my business. Find your super strength and exploit it, while you let others take care of things that slow you down.

Delegating is supposed to make your life easier, not complicate it even more. When you implement a system or bring on new people to take over certain tasks, make sure it’s efficient, so that you are not creating even more tasks for yourself. The more you delegate tasks to others, the more time you will have to spend on paving the way for your company. However, delegating only works when done effectively.

1. Hire the right people for the right task, make sure they have an understanding of your business and mission.
2. Know everyone’s strengths so that you delegate effectively.
3. Explain the tasks to employees, and don’t assume they know exactly what to do on their own. Be specific on the work to be done.

In the beginning, you’re not just the CEO of your business. You’re the customer service rep, you’re in charge of scheduling, planning, bookkeeping; the list goes on. But As your business grows, and you hire a team, they become partially responsible for the success of your business.

Learn when to say no.

Saying the word “no” is actually hard to say for most young entrepreneurs. You feel like you need to do it all, multitask your way through everything, while never slowing down. Taking on everything may seem like a good idea because it gets your name out there and you make great contacts that would perfect for your business. I thought the same thing at first, but quickly learned I took on way more than I could handle. I also hated saying “no” to people because I did not want to miss out on an opportunity. The truth is, saying no is better than promising something you’re not going to be able to accomplish in the amount of time something needs to be done. Don’t be afraid to say no to people, if you think it might take away from your business instead of growing your business.

As a young entrepreneur taking risks, you are going to make mistakes, but many times that is the best learning experience you can get. Don’t be afraid to mess up.

Ashley Bodi

http://blogs.forbes.com/yec/2011/06/20/why-you-as-an-entrepreneur-cant-do-it-all/

1. Scale up and sell. You could choose to scale up your business and make growth a priority in order to sell it in the intermediate term. To do this, you’ll have to find one product or service line that you can teach employees to deliver (or that you can program technology to handle) and hire a sales force to sell it. You’ll likely need to pour your cash and profits into growing, which means you’ll have to be content with drawing a basic salary and avoid declaring dividends for a while. Depending on how fast and big you want to grow, you may have to take on outside investors (angel, venture capital, private equity). If you’re successful, you’ll likely have a business you can sell down the road, which you’ll need to do to satisfy the shareholders you invite to invest.

2. Focus on building a great company, not a big one. My friend Bo Burlinghamwrote the book Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. Burlingham describes a growing number of CEOs whose focus is to build an amazing company, not necessarily a big one. He points to companies like Anchor Brewing, which shunned an initial public offering needed to raise capital to increase brewing capacity in favor of staying small and focusing on brewing great beer.

There is something very special about building a truly outstanding company piece by piece. Almost like an artist creating a masterpiece, the entrepreneur focused on being great instead of big can take his or her time, sanding off rough edges over months or years without the pressures to grow and cut corners. Assuming you retain 100 percent ownership of your business, you can use your company as a piggy bank, declaring a fat annual dividend. If you build a great yet slow-growth company, your end game might be to sell your business to your management team over time or to find an outside buyer looking for a premium offering to their lineup. Expect to get a lower multiple for your business when your growth rate is modest.

3. Be a guru. The third option is to shun building a traditional company and to build yourself up as a hired gun. While there is little leverage in the guru model, the better you get, the more you can charge for your time. Provided you don’t take on a lot of extra expenses, you can create a very nice lifestyle for yourself as a guru. Keep in mind it is virtually impossible to sell a guru business, nor is there the same satisfaction you get from building a great company, but you can create a nice income for yourself without many of the hassles that preoccupy a lot of business owners.

What you want to avoid is mixing these objectives. For example, if your goal is to grow a business, you can’t strip out all of the cash each year in the form of dividends as you could if you were slowly growing a great business over time. Likewise, if you want to build a great company instead of a big one, you can’t succumb to jealousy when you see your entrepreneurial peers enjoying big-time exits. If you’re a guru, don’t fall into the trap of hiring a bunch of staff or renting more office space than you need—there’s no point: you’re not building a company to sell, so the financial objective should be to maximize your annual take-home pay from one year to the next.

So I think the answer to your question is to decide on one of the paths above and never look back. All three models can create a wonderful lifestyle. The only danger comes when you think you want one thing but act as though you’re chasing something else.

John Warrillow is the author of Built To Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You, which was released by Portfolio/Penguin on April 28, 2011.

http://www.inc.com/articles/201106/whats-your-growth-strategy.html

Karen E. Klein: Your book contends that most business owners either don’t understand the financial details of their companies or don’t focus on them. How widespread do you think the problem is?

Bill Hettinger: It seems like 75 percent-ish don’t focus on their finances at all. Some of them are artistic people and finance is not the skill they are into. But even the folks who have technical backgrounds don’t tend to focus on finances. We find that people wait until they have some external reason to do so, like when they need to go to the bank for a loan, or they need a business plan, or there’s some sort of shock to the system.

Someone recently told me: “I’m a sales guy. I didn’t have to learn finance until I was 45 and opened my own business.” A publicist who worked with me said, “I used to have another business and I never really looked at [finances] until I had to sell the business.”

What problems result from that kind of hands-off approach?

On the most basic level, I’ve talked to entrepreneurs who have no idea how much money their companies make. You shouldn’t need to ask your accountant that. If you introduce a new product, you will have no way of determining whether you’ll make money off of it. Or you may buy a $25,000 piece of new equipment and you don’t figure out until later that you’ll never make enough money to pay for it.

Entrepreneurs often discover belatedly that cash isn’t income or that their business is not profitable. They take money from their companies before they have to pay for supplies or rent, and three months later they discover they don’t have any money to pay taxes.

If the company is successful, does the founder really have to be hands-on about the finances?

The problem is, who’s making the day-to-day business decisions? It’s probably not the accountant you see quarterly or annually, but you or one of your line managers. It’s important that you understand the impact those decisions are having on your bottom line.

Why is there resistance to examining the numbers closely?

We asked this same question when we set out to write [the book]. First, people always gravitate to what their skill set is, so they gravitate toward selling or cooking or whatever—not to numbers.

The other answer we came up with is that finance is complicated. It’s usually presented in accountant-speak, not really explained in plain English. We move terminology around in finance. Your accountant may be using different terms, like sales and revenue, which mean the same thing. If you’re not in on the language, that becomes very confusing.

Do you advise small business owners to take accounting or other finance courses?

Not necessarily, because accounting is very mechanical and it will be focused on stuff that business owners don’t really need to know.

The other thing we discovered: If you have ever looked through a finance book or class, they’re all based on manufacturing. So you’ll learn about raw material purchases and inventory. They don’t talk a lot about service businesses or retail businesses, even though manufacturing only accounts for a third of our economy today.

What do you recommend small business owners do to educate themselves?

You can read five books on small business finances, or take a Kauffman Foundation FastTrac training program, or affiliate with somebody who can provide you with basic financial training. We’ve got a local nonprofit agency that has put together a series of training programs on business. It’s proving really useful to the people who are taking it. When you can make decisions in a peer environment and have discussions about those decisions, that works very well.

What financial documents do you wish business owners could master?

I like to have people focus on a handful of key metrics. Classical accounting goes from the balance sheet to the profit-and-loss statement to the cash-flow statement. I think that’s backwards.

Our process is to have entrepreneurs start with their cash-flow statement. Cash is king in a small business, so this is your most important document. Better still, it looks like your checkbook—or it should—and most people are familiar with balancing a checkbook. It will show you whether, at the end of the month, you have money left over after you pay your bills.

We also tell people to focus on their growth rates, which they can pull out of their income statements. Look at your revenues and your expenses from one period to another. If your revenues are growing by 4 percent but expenses are growing by 10 percent, there’s a problem.

What other items should business owners be monitoring closely?

We tell people to look at their gross and operating margins so they know how much money they’re making on every sale. And look at how much time it takes you to get paid. We advise that everyone take PayPal or use electronic banking so they can speed up the payment process and get their money faster.

How aware should small business owners be of where they fit into the competitive landscape?

All business owners should compare themselves to the rest of their industry, even if they are small businesses playing with large businesses. Believe me, the Gap (GPS) knows what Abercrombie (ANF) and Macy’s (M) are doing. But a lot of small coffee shop owners have never looked at what Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks (SBUX) are doing.

In the book, we give data from various sites online about what ballpark margins are for various categories, like food businesses or high-end retail. If you can learn to calculate your own margins, you can compare yourself to these general numbers and it at least gives you something to jump off from. That helps tremendously.

How can successful business owners be so unaware of their standing?

A lot of small business owners are not truly building a business; they’re creating jobs for themselves. The definition of a business is making money off of the labor of someone else and creating something that has value beyond yourself.

Very many small businesses don’t have a strategy for making a business that can be sold after they’re done working at it. They are creating a revenue stream. That’s the difference for someone who has put together a profit-and-loss statement and has a balance sheet. At the end of the day, you can take that company down to the bank and expand it or sell it to someone. You can’t do that with a revenue stream.

Karen E. Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jun2011/sb20110610_994351.htm

Today Google added an interesting twist to Google Maps searches called Descriptive Terms that injects another dynamic – search optimized reviews. Google has started indexing local search results with phrases that accompany things like reviews. So if you search Marketing Agencies Kansas City, MO you get one set of listing and if you add something like “digital work” to the search the list changes based on words in the reviews.

Right now this is just a Google Maps function, but Google claims it will spread in Place search on Google.com and Google Maps for mobile soon!

Better start suggesting keyword phrases for those reviews people are anxious to write.

Learn More about mobile marketing:  http://www.uscsb.org/blog/uscsb-local-mobile-marketing-options

I have an idea for a business, but there is already a lot of competition. Do I need to find a new idea?

—Siobhain, Boston

The fact that there is a lot of competition in the industry you’re about to enter is actually a good sign.

I do some angel investing, and I get a little nervous when people say there is “no competition” for the idea they are proposing. The market has a funny way of sorting out the good ideas from the bad, and if there is no competition for your idea, chances are, there is no market either.

Companies’ succeeding in doing what you’re proposing is a good sign—the market has validated the core of your idea. Instead of reinventing the wheel, all you need to do is take a concept that is working and find a small corner of the market to dominate.

My friend Verne Harnish defines strategy as simply finding something that meets two criteria:
1.    Customers care about it.
2.    It makes you unique.

Is there something a segment of the market cares about that you can stake a claim to?

When Panasonic wanted to enter the crowded laptop market, it surveyed the landscape and saw Apple owned sexy, Dell owned direct, and HP owned innovation. Someone had already staked a claim to the big things customers cared about when buying a laptop, but there was a small segment of customers who wanted a laptop to be rugged above all else. Police forces want their officers to have laptops that can stand up to the rigors of the inside of a squad car. Traveling salespeople need their laptops to withstand the punishment of airport security. So Panasonic found a small but profitable niche in developing ToughBook—the most durable laptop on the market.

Think about the competitive market you want to enter and, like Panasonic, find an angle. Richard Branson entered the hyper-competitive airline business by launchingVirgin Airlines when he discovered there was a group of customers who wanted good but unpretentious service yet weren’t getting it from stuffy British Airways.

Branson didn’t shy away from the market because of the competition, but he did find an angle customers cared about that could make Virgin stand out in a crowded market.

John Warrillow is the author of Built To Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You, which was released by Portfolio/Penguin on April 28, 2011.

http://www.inc.com/articles/201106/no-competition-no-business.html

If the country is to recover financially and politically, new leaders will have to emerge to fill the leadership deficit—new leaders who understand that leadership is a privilege, not an entitlement—according to executive coach Michael Schutzler, author of the book Inspiring Excellence: A Path to Exceptional Leadership.

Entrepreneurs are well positioned to become the new leaders, because they perceive problems as opportunities and have the mindset to innovate and execute. They have the required passion, perseverance, and work ethic. What they don’t have by default are the skills required, or the relationships. These don’t come automatically with the CEO title.

Schutzler’s view of leadership is different than many academics and executive coaches, who feel that leadership is an innate character trait. He urges people to focus on developing a few key relationship skills, and I agree. Here are some key conclusions:

• Leadership is a learned behavior, not a character trait. Good judgment, for example, is certainly a hallmark of exceptional leadership, but it isn’t something you are born with. “More than anything, good judgment comes from listening,” he says. It also comes from paying very close attention to every situation, and learning from it.
• Listening is the most important skill for a leader. We need to pay attention to the words and actions of others while suspending judgment long enough to allow your intellect to catch up with your instincts. Why? Because as leaders, if we speak too soon, we shut off creation. We shut off contribution. We force the adoption of our ideas.
• Communication and storytelling are skills that not everyone is born with, but are ones we can all develop. People on your team want to believe! They want to believe you know where we are going, or you will get us there even if you aren’t sure of the exact path at this moment. They want stories that compare what they are doing with others.
• Acknowledging contribution is necessary to sustain motivation during the hard times. It’s not hard to do and doesn’t require a lot of effort or expensive gifts. A thank-you note or peer recognition is enough most of the time.
• Negotiation is a practical skill for every leader. It’s often misunderstood to be the domain of clever deal makers. It’s actually really simple: Make very clear requests for a promise, understand exactly what the promise is—what is being done, when, and what the standard of excellence is—and then check up on the status to make it happen.
• Too many leaders are focused on personal ambition. He believes that we need leaders who use power as a tool for inspiring others to create a better future, not as a tool for retaining their position or perks.

The middle four points are the essential skills for great leadership, inspiring excellence, and building a successful business. They are easily practiced and serve as the foundation for successfully attracting talent, reaching consensus, making tough choices, and harnessing ambition.

In this fashion the general leadership deficit is really an opportunity for new aspiring entrepreneurs in business. So practice the leadership skills needed, and step in when you are ready. Now is your golden opportunity. Let’s see how many of you are up to the challenge.

By Martin Zwilling

http://www.inc.com/articles/201106/6-essential-skills-for-starting-a-business.html

When you are working for yourself, the responsibility for staying on top of projects, communicating with clients, and collecting money you’re owed falls completely to you. There’s no boss checking in to make sure you are meeting deadlines, no team to keep you on track.

It helps to be naturally organized. If you’re not, you can learn to be. “Most people aren’t naturally good golfers, but they can be taught how to do it,” says Lisa Kanarek, founder of WorkingNaked.com in Dallas.

If you don’t put in some effort, you’ll have a tough time beingsuccessfully self-employed. Mark Miller, a self-employed marketing specialist who founded High Impact Marketing in Los Angeles, says he learned this the hard way. “I have never been a particularly organized or neat person in terms of keeping my things in order. Unfortunately, those traits did not translate well into the business world,” he says.

After spending hours each week digging through “50 archeological layers” of paperwork on his desk and missing a couple of crucial project follow-ups, Miller says, he realized he needed help: “I got a couple of books and took a couple courses on getting rid of clutter.” He learned to use a hard-copy planner, backed up by electronic Outlook task and appointment reminders. He combined that with a filing system that turned his horizontal layers into labeled, vertical files and has been more successful ever since, he says.

You don’t need to spend a fortune or invest a lot of time implementing a complicated system, Kanarek says. “It’s okay if you’re not completely organized. Don’t beat yourself up. Just find something that works for you and fits into your work style.” She recommends a few basics: Designate a specific workspace in your home, set up a regular work schedule, and establish a filing system for your paperwork.

AN OFFICE SPACE HELPS YOU FOCUS

With today’s technology, it’s easy to carry your computer and phone around and work in your kitchen, living room, or at your local coffeehouse. But if you don’t have an office space with a desk and a comfortable chair, you will never feel serious about working at home, Kanarek says. “Having a home base, where your printer and your files are going to be, mentally gets you focused.”

The same goes for having a regular schedule, whether you work days, evenings, or from midnight to 6 a.m. “Get up at roughly the same time every day and work out a routine. It can be flexible, but if you wait until 11 a.m. or noon to get to your desk, it’s going to be hard to get any momentum going,” she says.

Frequently, self-employed individuals have so much work to do that setting priorities becomes a challenge. Andrew Hindes, president of the In-House Writer, a copywriting business based out of his Los Angeles home, says he updates his to-do list weekly, dividing the tasks into four categories: urgent and important; important but not urgent; urgent but not important; and neither urgent nor important.

“What I find is that the third category—urgent but not important—steals a lot of time from things that are essential to my business but don’t have a deadline, like marketing and touching base with clients,” he says. “I find that I accomplish a lot more by having that list and making sure I accomplish some things in each quadrant every week.”

OUTSOURCE TASKS YOU HATE DOING

Hindes also outsources tasks that he is not good at and does not enjoy—something he has found crucial to successful self-employment. “I have a bookkeeper who comes in every two weeks and pays the bills, deposits the checks, and uses QuickBooks to track my expenses. It saves me so much time and so many headaches; it’s the best $200 a month I could ever spend,” he says.

Automating tasks and streamlining e-mail are additional techniques that may help you. Karl Goldfield, who worked as an independent sales consultant for four years, says he increased his efficiency by keeping his e-mail communications to three sentences maximum and establishing two blocks of time per day to read and respond to messages, unless they were urgent.

“Studies have shown that people spend 25 percent of their day stopping work to check and respond to e-mail. I had a virtual assistant who did nothing but go through my e-mail and manage my task list,” he says. “I was paying her for 30 or 40 hours a week. It was a nightmare.” After he began using Teambox, online collaboration software that streamlines and organizes e-mail, Goldfield liked the product so much he became the company’s vice-president of sales and marketing 14 months ago. That free tool and similar products allow users to scroll through e-mails and convert them into tasks or delegate them to others. “It organized how I work. Having a centralized hub for communication makes it easier to see what’s going on and find what I need, when I need it,” he says.

Karen E. Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jun2011/sb2011067_106902.htm

And, each year, I’m reminded that even the “best” business plans can have serious flaws. Some project profits far beyond reality. Others bury key details far down in the document.

Reading these business plans inspired me to create a list of the top mistakes that I identified. I’ve outlined them below with some tips for how to avoid making them.

1. Projecting outrageous profits. More than half of the business plans I read this year projected profits way beyond the normal 10 percent to 15 percent that most other businesses see. High profitability projections indicate that the business owner is underestimating costs and expenses. They also suggest that the owner is choosing profits over growth. The best startups generally invest whatever money is left over from costs and expenses into marketing for higher growth.

To avoid doing this, find some standard financial reports for an industry like yours and figure out what real companies generate in profits. Then go back and rethink your estimates. Is your gross margin higher than average? Can you justify that? Are your marketing expenses lower than average?

Related: How to Forecast Revenue and Growth

2. Incomplete financial projections. Every business plan should include a realistic cash flow projection and a breakdown of starting costs. It’s good to use charts to do this but also make the details available somewhere in the document, even in an appendix. Show how much investment you need and what you’ll do with the money. Just projecting sales and profits isn’t enough.

If you plan on selling your products to businesses, you’ll need to show that you understand the cash flow implications of waiting to get paid. If you want to build products or websites, show that you understand the cash flow implications of building things or buying things before you sell them.

3. Top-down forecasting. I hope to never see another business plan promising to get a small percentage of a large market. Yes, 1 percent of $43 billion is $430 million but, no, you’re not going to sell that much.

Instead, go granular. Start with specific assumptions and work upward to the sales forecast. Build your sales forecast up from the unit economics and on detailed assumptions that you can illustrate.

4. Inflating the market. No one is going to believe you when you say, for example, that your musician tutorial website is going to appeal to 50 million people. When talking about total market value, you need to be realistic, skeptical and make assumptions to bring those huge market numbers down.

Consider the market projection based on words — a story — instead of using numbers. Talk about what market you will disrupt and let the readers use their imaginations about how big it is.

Related: A Market Analysis Worksheet

5. Too “big picture.” Business plans often deal only in global strategies, showing only the big picture. A business plan needs to illustrate the economics of a single unit — from production, to channels, to end user. Show what you get, what it costs you and what the buyer pays. Also show how you’re going to scale up, how you’re going to build a direct sales force, how you’re going to build web traffic and how long your sales cycle will take.

6. Unrealistic about selling channels. Not understanding how retail channels work is a big mistake. Don’t assume that retailers will want to buy your product directly from you. Most often, they want to go through a distributor. If you plan on selling through channels and to take home more than 50 percent of what the end consumer pays, then you don’t know your channels.

Know your margins, including administrative costs and co-promotion dollars for distributors and retail stores that carry products like yours. Once you’ve got that down, you’ll need to remember to allocate enough working capital to support your business while you wait for distributors to pay your invoices.

Related: From Concept to Market

7. Buried treasure. Communicate your key points quickly. Some key points that investors look for include market, sales projections, your management team, scalability and defensibility.

Also remember to communicate your points clearly and in plain language. Prove your technology by quoting experts and showing your degrees and qualifications. Then show sales, channels, markets, strategy and your team.

By Tim Berry

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/219720

The irony is that those who take responsibility to overcome these mental hurdles and start a business, often don’t look back. Fear is short-lived and often replaced by an experience of empowerment and a commitment to success.

Are you afraid of taking the entrepreneurial leap? Here are a few of the false assumptions that are fueled by fear, along with tips for moving beyond what may be holding you back.

“If I find the right business, I will succeed.” This assumes the winning formula of a business resides outside the skills and experience of the entrepreneur and inside the business products and systems. This mindset can lead to endless nitpicking over what is wrong with every business opportunity that pops up. An experienced entrepreneur thinks, “The business doesn’t make me successful. I make the business successful.” This more powerful truth can empower an entrepreneur to acknowledge the potential pitfalls then figure out ways to make it work.

“Being self-employed is unpredictable and I want a comfortable and normal life.” While almost everyone likes stability and security, entrepreneurs accept and plan for inconsistency in the short term in exchange for a life and career they choose in the long run. Someone with “an employee mindset” is like someone who sits comfortably in the stands watching the big gamewondering what it would be like to play. The business owner takes the field and plays all out.

“I’m afraid of the unknown.” People who are afraid of owning their own business are terrified by the ambiguity that comes with it. Entrepreneurs don’t like ambiguity either, but accept it as something temporary and fully expect the business to produce a more predictable result in near term.

“A business failure will kill me.” Entrepreneurs don’t like failure, but they typically won’t put themselves in situations they won’t survive. A seasoned entrepreneur understands what the worst-case scenario is, and crafts a “survival strategy” in case it happens. While entrepreneurs don’t expect to fail, they will survive if they do.

“It’s not the right time to start a business.” Some people act as if the universe is comprised of two time periods — the right time to start a business and the time the would-be entrepreneur is currently living in. A trueentrepreneur declares now to be the right time and finds ways to make it work.

Ask yourself what one action you should be taking to bring you closer to my goals. Then, regardless of how large or small that action is, take it. Spend a day writing your business plan. If you want to start a consulting business, take on just one client.

The best advice for would-be entrepreneurs may have come from St. Francis of Assisi: “Start by doing what’s necessary. Then do what’s possible. And suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

In many cases, debt burdens and a matrix of suspicious creditors can completely negate the goals of a once-profitable business. Financial restructuring is the most effective way of coping with these stressors, and a complicated apparatus of financial and legal safety nets are available to the savvy corporation.

A carefully considered strategy, which includes bringing in qualified leadership, providing honest forecasts, and encouraging administrative transparency, is the only reliable way to ensure long-term viability in an unpredictable marketplace. Financial restructuring is often a last resort, but invariably the most effective one. Here is what you need to know to get started, whom you’ll need to bring in to help, and what challenges to expect once the process is underway.

How to Undertake a Financial Restructuring: Redefine Your Goals

Most business models do not have a ready-made solution to drastic changes in an individual market or a severe downturn in the greater economy. Success is planned for; survival is often resorted to. This might sound grim, but success and survival go hand in hand.

Facing a market environment that can change overnight due to the introduction of new technologies and outlets such as social media is a daunting task for any business manager, and often the initial measures taken are not enough. The consequences of continued dependence on obsolete resources and the shock of sudden market change are challenging, but they can be dealt with.

Before the steps listed below can be taken, executives and employees must accept the realities of financial and corporate restructuring, which can include downsizing, departmental re-organization, and changes at the highest levels of management.

The key concepts that should define your new goal are accuracy and honesty. Interested parties who have a financial stake in the success or failure of a company will demand precise predictions and clear objectives. The importance of accurate forecasting is critical to the success of any restructuring plan. Reductions in operating costs and emergency budgeting are short-term measures intended to solidify long-term profits. Without a plan, the channels of credit and liquidity will quickly dry up, and debt burdens will only continue to accrue.

By Kevin Garcia

http://www.inc.com/guides/201104/how-to-undertake-a-financial-restructuring.html