The old saying goes “Watch the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves”.

It is seems quite old fashion today’s world.  What with high speed programs on you mobile device, why would I actually need to look at my money flows?  Surely that’s what I pay my accountant to do.

When I first went farming in 1994, we kept receipts and records of expenses the accountant needed to do our tax returns.  Ours was and still is a relatively small enterprise.  We bought what we needed, paid the bills, sent the details off once a year and kept on farming. Our accountant at the time was a heck of a nice fellow and he gave honest and sound advice.  But we weren’t really getting anywhere

When I did my first holistic management course in 2000, I learned the difference between taxation and profit.  While we need an accountant for the tax part, we don’t need him for the profit part.    Once we learned what is required for any business to make a profit each and every year, we set about changing the way we managed. And sure enough the profits came in.  We still did plenty of work and we still had challenging times and we still had to make tough decisions. The thing that was different was we now understood who and what was responsible the profitability of our enterprise.  The who, was easy. We saw this person each day, after breakfast in the mirror when cleaning our teeth. The what, was pretty simple too.  It was awareness of the cost of production.

In pretty short order, we worked out, with a pen and paper, what were our production costs.  This prompted us to ask, why we had those costs? Which led to, do we need them and or can we do without them? Which in turn lead us to question every cost we had in our lives.  It was amazing what we were spending money on that was not bringing in any income. And some of the changes were not that easy or comfortable.  But, as we were now committed to making a profit each year, rather than just costing along, hoping a lamp with a Jennie in it would was up with the next flood, we began to focus on the things in our business we really did have control of.

The beauty of managing your life and enterprise holistically, is that you make decisions based on what is most important to you and your family, based on what you value most.  One thing that my wife and I value is a good night sleep. So, we manage the cash that flows in and out of our life and business in a manner that ensures we always have cash on hand, we know approx what is coming in and going out and when. Peace of mind is a wonderful asset to have.

At Landlife Education we help folks for all over the world get a solid handle on what is going on in their business.  We are delivering training programs in Queensland beginning in April 2015.  For more information about how we can help you, drop by the web site or give a call.  A positive choice for change, is just a choice away.