Cash is King – Overcoming the Seven Barriers to Business Success
It has been said that “cash is king” and that money makes the world go ‘round. So the question is, can you tell your organization’s “money story”—how it generates revenue and profits, maximizes cash flow and steers clear of trouble? Not the practiced version that is supplied to the company’s investors, but the actual per unit economics, the metrics indicating the financial viability of the organization, what is working well and what needs to be improved, and when to hit the brakes or pound the accelerator?
To be able to tell the money story, the CEO and CFO must have access to transparent, real-time performance data to analyze and compare to strategic plans. Business leaders must be able to take the pulse of KPIs and other measurements to accurately and confidently describe how much money the company is making today (or losing) and likely to generate tomorrow. Such descriptions also need to be both comprehensive and specific— full, deep-dive money story and the particular parts within this narrative like a product, market or geography.
Muting the ability to precisely tell these tales are what we are calling the Seven Barriers to Positive Cash Flow, which we introduce one by one in this report. Each barrier limits leadership’s ability to know what is going on in the organization to make informed, insightful and assertive decisions that drive profitable business growth. The outcome is often dire—lost market share, slow growth and the inevitable crash that occurs when flying blind.
Certainly, given today’s searing pace of business on the global landscape, CEOs and CFOs must have instant visibility into critical business data to direct the organization towards the most profitable business opportunities and steer clear of enterprise risks. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many companies, according to a study by The Hackett Group. As businesses expanded their scale and scope across the world, “they lost visibility across multiple performance categories,” the report states.
Without visibility, there is no money story, only generalized guesses that lack the rigor to assess actual performance. The solution is to rid the company of the Seven Barriers thwarting an honest-to-goodness truthful account.
Download to discover:
- How to capture real-time and accurate data
- How to identify which KPIs are right for measuring your business performance
- Overcoming business challenges to success
- The first steps toward marking informed and insightful decisions for growth
