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cash flow
Do you ever wonder if your medical practice needs a chief financial officer? What if you could have the strategic financial guidance without the full-time executive price tag? Today's guest explains how fractional CFOs are helping healthcare practices thrive while letting providers focus on what matters most, patient care. This is episode #166 of the Thriving Practice with Tracy Cherpeski featuring Lizette Peña, Fractional CFO at Ascent CFO Solutions.
By Pam Wismer, Fractional CFO, Ascent CFO Solutions
This article was originally published in Construction Business Owner Magazine.
The very mention of fluctuating cash flow can cause anxiety for construction company owners. Without sufficient planning for a slow season, even seasoned businesses may find themselves in a cash crisis from time to time. While weather can be an obvious culprit for midsized general contractors — particularly those in nonresidential construction such as commercial, road and highway, or heavy construction — a slow season can also be related to factors such as project life cycles, regional labor shortages, or a poorly quoted or scoped job. In severe circumstances, a company must be strong enough to survive the cash drought without becoming insolvent and remain well-positioned for new projects as the market improves.
Consider these tips to financially prepare for and navigate an unexpected slow season.
Year-end planning is imperative for all businesses, especially as they navigate a changing and uncertain business environment. Over the last six months, rising inflation and a likely recession has created fear and panic for some companies as they look to 2023. While business leaders have little control over macroeconomic cycles, they do have the ability to truly understand the specific components of their business, adjust and be flexible in their goals and spending, and navigate uncertainty with greater confidence. Ascent CFO Solutions’ Founder and Fractional CFO Dan DeGolier shares his insights on how businesses can take advantage of year-end planning and forecasting, how to handle financial uncertainty, and ways to elevate your business for greater success in 2023.
Whether you operate a mature, consistently profitable business or a loss-generating startup, cash flow is the oxygen of your business operations. Even for companies generating positive net income, poor cash flow management consistently ranks as a leading cause of business failure. If you only have the bandwidth as a CEO to focus on one financial metric, tracking and understanding cash flow can help you avoid failure and is essential to sustainably operating, growing, and selling a business.
As we look forward to the new year, many of us are finding it challenging to plan for our businesses with economic uncertainty still looming. The difficulty of predicting when we might start to see economic recovery and determining what that means for our business and growth leaves us all wishing we had a crystal ball. At Ascent CFO, we have been working with our clients to address the unknown by building out scenarios that plan for a slow economic recovery with flexibility that allows for acceleration should we see recovery happen sooner than forecasted. Here are a few tips that you may find helpful to put your company in a conservative, yet opportunistic position.
