From Burke Franklin, “the man who launched a million businesses”
and Fred G. Parrish named “America’s small business CFO”
by Michael E. Gerber, author of the “E-Myth”

 

Entrepreneur? Business Owner? CEO? CFO?

 

Before You Develop
Your Strategic Plan for 2021…

 

What if you could first easily project the possible outcomes of your ideas for doing business in the “new normal?”

 

How might your “pivot” ideas play-out over the next few months or years?

 

Thursday Nov 19 – 3:00 EDT / 2:00 CDT / Noon PDT

Meet Your Hosts

ProfitBeacon’s QuickBooks® Financial Analyzer Meets BizPlanBuilder to Plot Your Future

We’ll also offer a variety of useful ideas for succeeding in a future of uncertain times.

When you use Quickbooks with the ProfitBeacon, you can easily estimate the potential effects of your ideas.
With the BizPlanBuilder dashboard you can coordinate and collaborate with your team and advisors to optimize every aspect of your strategy.

Burke Franklin
CEO, Business Power Tools

Fred Parrish, CPA
CEO, Profit Experts, Inc.

What’s a nice guy like Burke doing in a business like this?

Burke has been helping entrepreneurs and business owners for more than 40 years — mostly from within his Business Power Tools software apps and templates, and thru his blogs and book Business Black Belt, and now he’s teamed up with Fred Parrish to deliver a unique solution to your business.

Using Business Power Tools’ BizPlanBuilder you can coordinate and collaborate with your team and advisors to consider the effect of your choices on other critical areas of your business. The software dashboard offers the practical tools you need to optimize each aspect of your operational enterprise.

In the early ’80s, Burke was the electronics buyer and copywriter for the Sharper Image catalog. Later, he sold some really cool word-processors in Silicon Valley. After Macs and PCs became popular, he started his own business creating sales literature for tech companies.

Burke’s friend had a deal going to sell his engineering software to Apple. They wanted to see his business plan to be sure his company would stay in business to upgrade and support the system. At the time, Burke viewed a business plan as an elaborate brochure that sold his concept to people at all levels, and responsibilities with various perceptions, biases, and interests. (He learned that from selling word-processors.)

They got the deal.

Over the next year, people came to him with some brilliant ideas, but their plans weren’t getting funded. I helped them fill in the missing parts to succeed. Along the way, he saw that business plans have a fundamentally universal structure. Hmmm…

Burke took all the content he’d developed, redacted everything proprietary, but filled in the blanks with a variety of customizable multiple-choice options, and offered it as a software template that many people could use…

This became BizPlanBuilder. And his new company took off!

He followed-up with MarketingBuilder, which picked-up where BizPlanBuilder left off, then he went even further with PRBuilder which included sample press release templates… In another direction, he added EmployeeManualBuilder and SafetyPlanBuilder full of actual policies and procedures.

Altogether, he had 10 products in about 3,500 retail stores and built a $12 million company with 30 employees…

Today, all of his products have been integrated into a streamlined online dashboard. And he’s the leader in business development software templates.

Saved by the numbers

During my 40-year career, I have witnessed many examples of how good organizations should be managed and countless others where the results were not nearly as positive as they could have been. I have seen numerous otherwise bright and capable people who took their businesses and inexplicably ran them into a wall. Most of those companies could have survived and thrived but didn’t. Why?

The signs were all there, and the concerns were voiced. They just couldn’t “see” what was coming. They were more comfortable using instinct rather than data in decision-making.

After watching these unhappy events play out over and over, I thought there must be a system that could be developed to provide an advanced warning of impending problems and offer the ability to test for different options to resolve them without the traditional trial and error approach. There would also need to be a mechanism for communicating those results with “actionable intelligence” that is readily understandable by any busi­ness owner.

CFOs are equipped to analyze, predict and, then help navigate through difficulties that are developing on the horizon. Unfortunately, most small businesses cannot afford a true CFO. But someone has to do the work, or the company is at great risk

What about the company’s CPA or internal accountant?

Frankly, the accounting department is usually where financial information goes to die. The accountants line the numbers up in the right columns, reconcile the bank accounts, and produce a few reports. Then the owner reviews the P&L (and maybe the balance sheet) sends a copy to the bank and drops it in a file never to be seen again. We must have a way to extract the intelligence that is hidden in those reports and put it to work.

The average small business owner avoids accounting and finance like the plague.

They loathe analysis and gravitate to those areas of their busi­nesses that are sales or production oriented. The reason: that’s often what they like to do and what they do best. Yet it is crucial for them to have clarity about the financial operations of their business. Otherwise, they are at risk of making a fatal decision at any point.

We have developed The Profit Beacon™ as an automated CFO to solve this small business conundrum.