Facing the facts

At Entreleadership Dave talked about not only looking at your P&L. I admit that it's easy (and fun) to look at the pretty graph that quickbooks makes that shows my profit and loss with. I decided that I needed to start peeling the layers off this and really get down to the facts about how my business is doing. You know...sometimes the truth hurts. I figured out that it costs me .80 cents a minute for my business to be open. If you want to do the math you can but basically that means I have a lot of expenses. My take away from the whole endeavor was that I need to be very proactive about watching the bottom line. I need to document and track everything. That is really the only way I can know if profits are staying up and expenses are going down. This summer I got kicked in the teeth because I wasn't watching these numbers close enough. I will never let that happen again.