This class was the second day of financing. The emphasis was on balance sheets, double entry and how to charge for your product or service.

The most interesting part was actually trying to cost your product or service. The things that you need to factor in when calculating your workable hours are: holidays, travel, sick leave, meetings etc. These things coupled with the costs of labour, rent, insurance, rates, tax and other fees leaves you thinking that you need to charge as much as the market can bare without loosing out to the competition, just to break even is a fine balance to say the least.

There were some other interesting observations from the examples that we did. In the current climate it is really worth investigating if you should rent or buy the equipment that you need for your business.

It is obvious from a business perspective to function well involves having as much cash as possible…. this is very cliche but “Cash is King”, it is better to have a much longer credit time with any of your debtors whilst getting the money owed to you in as soon as you can, your bank balance will always look healthy, not to mention that you will have money should you need it.

Seems simple from the outset, in reality is it not that straightforward.

Our second day of marketing, this is where we really got down to the nuts and bolts of what we should do to market our business. This included primary and secondary marketing, investigation and research i.e. competitors, competitive advantage, why would someone choose us over our competitors, what bodies are useful for starting up a business, not necessarily marketing: Ibec, Isme.

Some really good tips on questionnaires and examples of them out there: Google doc, Survey Monkey. These are usually a requirement for information to ultimately go into a business plan.

It was really impressed upon us is that referral’s are the best way to generate business. At long last I finally got to use some of the business cards - everyone seemed to like the simplicity of them.

Really liked some of the idea’s presented in this day of marketing, I am not going to give away too much, also the one to one session with the lecturer helped generate contacts, leads & angles that people would never have looked at.

One thing really clear from the session is that everyone is working lots of hours to get his/her business off the ground, but the question was posed:

Are we managing our time efficiently??

We should be setting smart goals, this seems trivial from the outset, but when it comes to actual time estimation… most people couldn’t give an accurate answer.