There’s a common misconception among agency owners and managers that “increasing utilisation” means either “getting more working hours out of the team” or “just doing something constructive for the business”. Utilisation in a people business is, at its simplest, a measure of the proportion of time your team spend on executing client work (ideally billable…

There’s a lot of talk about business “dashboards”, and no standard way of doing them. The test should be: if you look at a “dashboard’ item, and it tells you something valuable within 5 seconds, and you might make a change or pull a different lever because of it, then it’s worthwhile. If you stare…

If you run a small business, chances are you occasionally (or hopefully regularly) see a month-by-month P&L for the business, with columns from left to right, one for each month up to and including last month. It’s a fairly basic but essential way of tracking, at the broadest level, whether your incomes & costs are…

You may have read before that “around 80% of businesses fail because of cash flow”. I’ve heard this reeled out as though cash flow is some kind of self-contained natural selection tool which only allows 20% of businesses to survive. Actually it’s a hugely misleading line. It’s not that 80% of businesses fail in the…