Caroline Smith started her business Jackadder Business Consulting to help businesses improve how they ran their business and their processes. She soon realised that the number one area most people needed assistance was with finances. So she became a BAS agent and began offering bookkeeping services. She realised that when you offer bookkeeping services people are asking about how they can grow their business and how can they become more profitable.
“When I heard about Profit First I thought wow, this is a method that can be used with any business successfully if they follow the method.”
Caroline recently sat down with Profit First Australia CEO Laura Elkaslassy to talk about her journey to becoming a Profit First Professional and her experience seeing businesses transform after implementing Profit First.
In their discussion Laura and Caroline spoke about:
- How Profit First can change your business.
- How using a Profit First Professional to implement Profit First can help you grow your business and achieve your dreams.
- If you’re not ready to fully implement Profit First just yet, Caroline shares with us her recommendations on how to slowly make the transition.
What does Profit First teach you about your business?
When you start your business, you do things the easy way. But once you grow you need to change the ways you do things, to reduce your costs. Don’t always do things the same way you have always have.
You don’t need to increase your price if you reduce your expenses and you will make more money. You need to review your prices, even by only inflation to increase your profit margins.
If your business has lots of costs for materials, subcontractors in order to produce the goods for your business, it’s best to separate those into a separate account, so you can easily identify the costs of producing goods for your business against running costs for your business. Caroline suggests keeping the cost of making your product to between 30-40%.
Profit First shows you more than just the numbers, it can help you review efficiencies, owners costs, ensuring costs are viable, Profit First enables you to demonstrate hard evidence, to see the writing on the wall and make the changes that they need.
How can you make it work? If you can’t make it work are you going to keep doing it that same way? Changes are necessary. Profit First highlights things that you don’t want to let go of, but you need to work through these changes. – Caroline Smith
Why does working with a PFP make sense?
Working with a PFP takes the emotion of change away, they can lead you through changes that are strategic changes to improve your overall business.
Most clients have problems understanding how to calculate the percentages. This all starts with a Profit and Loss statement and if clients don’t understand the basics around a Profit and Loss statement they can be a bit confused on where to start. That’s where I usually start with most clients, I take a look at the numbers and then present the figures to the client.
Once they have shared their goals with me, I can take that into account to set the percentages to ensure that they achieve their goals and achieve their dreams.
Using a PFP they have the backing of Profit First Australia and Profit First in the US. If we haven’t implemented a client similar to you in the past, there will be someone in our network who has, that we can speak to and gain insights into what worked for them.
Working with a professional, they can work with you to achieve your goals. Working with a PFP is more than the methodology, it’s making the changes in order to achieve your goals and achieve your dreams.
What do you love most about Profit First?
Profit First for the first time has given me a consistent income since running my own business. Yes some months more or less goes into the owners pay account but there is always that money to pay me. Profit First makes business easier, the money is always there, it streamlines your processes.
