By Rich Bond
Here’s a question I’ll bet you haven’t heard many recruiters ask. But it’s one I used to ask candidates when I was prepping them for interviews:
“There are three tenses in the English language: past, present and future. Which one is the most important tense?”
Eventually, I stopped asking the question because I rarely, if ever, got the answer I wanted – the future. The ideal answer for a candidate would be that you talk about what you accomplished in the past and how that will benefit the potential new employer in the future through improved profitability and more efficient operations.
You may be wondering how that relates to your business. I often hear from the owners of private business that they think they have great people and strong products, but they’re disappointed in their level of profitability, and the value of their company. Yet, I rarely hear what they’re going to do about it.
The reason they have a hard time telling me is because they have insufficient financial information. Many of these companies have grown up to 10 times from their startup size. But they’re still using the same basic information systems they used when they set the business up, which was basic bookkeeping. Consequently, they are only getting historical information. Historical information alone is of little or no value.
What’s lacking is having financial systems and people who can not only tell you what did happen, but also project what will happen and what you can do to make things better.
Such a financial information evolution has taken place in larger public companies because of the software they have. Such software is actually available now to any size company because it’s gotten much cheaper.
Making this information work for you, however, is more of an art than it is a science. You also need have on board people who understand how to get the most out of the software, perform actionable analyses. and help you and your team work together to come up with recommendations that will improve your profitability and help you grow more rapidly.
Over the years, we’ve been able to place financial professionals, such as controllers or CFOs, who have helped their new company increase profits between 50% and 100%. As you can see on my website, I call what I do “Results-based Recruiting” because the people I recruit produce results for my clients.
How is your business doing? I’d love to hear about your challenges of the present and goals for the future. Contact me to talk about how we can work together to move your business from a backward focus and make it perform more the way that you want, expect, and believe it can. My email is: richard.bond@bondandcompany.com. My phone is 203-221-3233.
