Articles And Book Reviews About Moving From Being Stuck To Getting Unstuck

From time to time, a business owner will contact me and ask for a free Business SOS because their business has cash flow difficulties.

The first issue we face is the problem of diagnosis. A business may be experiencing cash flow problems for a number of different reasons and curing the problem for the long term means getting to the root cause.

Cash flow difficulties normally mean that the business is struggling:

• To pay suppliers when they chase for their money after selling on credit, or
• When another supplier insists on payment on order or delivery and no money means no goods, or
• When the business owner is struggling to find the money to meet the weekly or monthly payroll, or
• When  the business can’t meet a periodic payment like the quarterly rent or VAT, or
• When the business owner wants to take money out of the business for personal use and the money isn’t there.

The Causes Of Cash Flow Problems

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If your business is losing money, you have a situation that can’t be sustained indefinitely. The clock is ticking and, unless changes are made, your business will fail.

The Cash Burn

In the days of the dot.com bubble in the late 1990s, a new measure became the rage called the cash burn, measured in months.

This was the number of months the business could continue to trade as it currently was, before it ran out of cash.

This was simply the amount of funding available divided by the monthly cash outflow.

If there was £80,000 in the bank and the business was using £20,000 of it a month, the cash burn was 4 months. If nothing changed, then the following month, it would be three months as the cash would have dropped by £20,000.

This meant that an end date could be calculated. If your cash burn at the end of April was 4 months, then everything was over by the end of August unless:

a) the net cash used changed for the better;

b) more money was invested into the business to give it an extended life.

It’s simple arithmetic that halving the burn rate, from £20,000 to £10,000 per month extended the life of the business. The £80,000 = 4 months became 8 months and that gave much more time for bright ideas to be thought about, implemented and improved before the crunch.

The Break Even Point

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I offer business owners based in the UK, a Business SOS consultation if they feel they or their business is stuck or struggling.

The Business SOS Offer

This is a 90 minutes conversation that can be on the telephone although I’d prefer to do it over Skype because it means that we can share screens. [continue reading…]

The full title of this book by Gabor Holch is

“Breaking the Circle: Vicious circles in business“.

In my review at Amazon.co.uk, I gave it a FOUR Stars rating, which means I consider it as good to very good.

Here it is.

An interesting book to help you get unstuck

I’m surprised that there aren’t more books about vicious circles to help to break the destructive forces that get people trapped.

I first became interested in understanding vicious circles when I was introduced to systems thinking by a book called The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge.

In technical terms, vicious circles and their opposites, virtuous circles are caused by positive (or reinforcing) feedback loops. They are positive because they build momentum, either up or down and contrast with compensating feedback loops that work like the central heating thermostat and work towards reaching a target. [continue reading…]

The full title of this book my Paul Avins is

“Business SOS: 173 Proven, Fast-Acting Strategies to take Your Business from Surviving to Thriving“.

It won’t be a surprise for you to know that I couldn’t resist reading this since I abbreviate my free Business Second Opinion Sessions to Business SOS.

In my review at Amazon.co.uk, I gave the book a Four stars rating. This means that I feel it is in the good to very good category.

Here is my review.

Plenty of ideas to increase sales and profit

This is a good summary of how to improve the results of a business that draws on the ideas of many well known “gurus”.

If you’ve read many small business success books, I don’t think it will include much that’s new to you but, even so, it is a good reminder of what you should be doing.

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The full title of this book by Andrew Miller is

“Hope Won’t Pay the Wages: How to deal with the personal impact of a struggling business“.

In my review at Amazon.co.uk, I gave it the full FIVE Stars, meaning I consider the book to be excellent.

Here it is.

A great help for struggling business owners

There are plenty of books about how a business in trouble can be turned around but this is the first book I’ve seen that focuses on the business owner. [continue reading…]

I gave the book

A Health Check for Your Business

by John F. Gittus, Three Stars in my review on Amazon.co.uk.

Here is my review.

Help to spot problems in a business before they become too serious

I wrote my MBA dissertation on how small businesses in financial difficulties can be rescued and one of the important conclusions was to catch the problems early, before time and money are close to running out. [continue reading…]

The full title of this book by Cara Stein is

“Getting Unstuck: How to transform your life one step at a time“.

In my review on Amazon.co.uk, I rated this book at the Four Stars level. This means I consider to be in the good to very good range.

Here is my review.

A very helpful book to get your life unstuck

I’ve been reading and reviewing books about how to get a business unstuck but this time I have stepped into looking at how someone gets their life unstuck. There is some crossover as a stuck business owner will cause the business to be stuck and vice versa, business problems spill into personal lives. [continue reading…]

The full title of this book by Larry Kesslin, Chris Winter and Susan Caba is

Breakpoints: Where Businesses Get Stuck. and How They Get Unstuck!

In my review posted on Amazon.co.uk, I gave it Three Stars.

Here is my review.

An interesting book about the growing pains as companies get bigger

While this book has the subtitle “where businesses get stuck. .. and how they get unstuck”, it’s really about the growing pains from startup through to building a business of 100+ people. [continue reading…]