During our May Facebook live session, Profit First Australia & New Zealand CEO Laura Elkaslassy was very excited to chat with Alex Woods from Thinking Cloud in Adelaide. Alex is a qualified accountant that specialises in e-commerce businesses, and was actually one of the very first Profit First Professionals here in Australia & New Zealand, having completed his PF training in the USA.
We hope you enjoy watching. Thank you again to Alex for being with us and we’ll see you all next month for another Facebook live.
Watch the video
It was just a real game-changer as far as I’m concerned because it just simplifies that whole process and it’s just a really versatile tool that every business should have. – Alex Woods
When it comes to e-commerce and retail can you tell us a little bit about that industry and sector and how you do things?
With e-commerce there seems to be a lot more moving parts. You’ve got different gateways and different sites like Amazon and Shopify, you’ve also got the inventory side of things, the way different businesses ship stuff, and then people that are trading in multi currencies so they’re trading in all different markets over the world so there’s complications with that and sales tax and those sort of things. It can be rather complicated, probably a bit more than your general run-of-the-mill retail business that’s just in store. It keeps you on your toes!
Why did you become a Profit First Professional?
Profit First just provided something that is a lot simpler for the end-user. You can still do the cash flow forecast and expand on that but it’s just a really easy, simple way of managing the cash flowing through your business. I just stumbled on it accidentally one day reading a blog post and I thought oh this is fantastic! I downloaded the book, I read it in a day and then I rang Ron the next day and I think within a week or two I was signed up. It was just a real game-changer as far as I’m concerned because it just simplifies that whole process and it’s just a really versatile tool that every business should have.
What’s the biggest challenge clients come to you with and how does Profit First assist in solving that?
Well there’s a couple of things. There’s the nature of the highs and lows, like a lot of them doing a massive amount of sales over a short period of time and then the rest of the year they’re basically not doing a lot or very little. You get these big peaks and big troughs of sales, so trying to flatten out the the cash flow over the whole year is one thing that Profit First is a really good tool for that sort of thing.
