Your Business—Your Money: Financial Literacy

This Workshop is FREE and sponsored by DECD. Preregistration is required.

Understanding financial statements is essential to understanding how well your business is doing. If you are not monitoring, and understanding, your financial statements on a regular basis, you are not managing your business.

Why Financial Literacy is Essential to Your Success

Your business plan will need a set of detailed financial projections; potential lenders or investors will insist upon it. This workshop provides the financial grounding you need to later develop the financial projections required in your business plan.

In this workshop you will learn about the three key financial statements:

The Balance Sheet

The balance sheet measures the long term health of the organization. Is your business getting stronger over time, or weaker? Are you monitoring your balance sheet for developing cash flow problems? Are you alert to indications of customer dissatisfaction? If not, you could be missing early signs of potential trouble.

The Income Statement (P&L, operating statement, earnings report, etc.)

The income statement monitors your business’s profitability and operating performance period over period. The income statement helps you determine if you are operating efficiently, relying on too much or too little on general and administrative support (overhead) or potentially underpricing the market. In effect, the P&L helps you measure your overall effectiveness as a manager.

The Statement of Cash Flows

The statement of cash flows can be the most important of the financial statements, particularly at start up, expansion or market contraction. The cash flow statement reconciles the balance sheet and the income statement to project available cash going forward. Cash – not profits – pays the bills. Do your company a favor, monitor your cash on a recurring basis.

Your Presenter: Russ Smith

Russ served as the Executive Director of the Lowell Small Business Assistance Center, and has over ten years of experience in teaching entrepreneurship and counseling start-ups, established businesses and businesses in crisis. He served on the Massachusetts Small Business Advisory Council during the Romney and Patrick administrations and the Community and Banking Council’s Economic Development Committee.

Russ is the founder of Sales and Marketing Search, an executive search firm that recruited sales and marketing professionals for high technology companies. After eight years he sold the company to pursue his passion for teaching. He has taught and guest lectured at North Shore Community College, Hesser College, and Middlesex Community College. Russ has an MBA from the University of Connecticut at Storrs and a BA from Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, Ohio.