25 Stories About Work – Page 3

25 Stories About Work – It’s All About Cash Flow (Part II, Large Companies)

May 3, 2015May 3, 2015 by Carl from Chicago

I was recently on a plane doodling and thought of some funny / interesting stories from 25+ years of working and traveling. So I decided to write them up as short, random chapters of a non-book with the title of this post. Hope you enjoy them and / or find them interesting. Certainly the value will be at least equal to the marginal cost of the book (zero)…

The USA, early 1990s to mid 2010s

When we have new staff I usually orientate them on the concept that

You should assume that many outside vendors who bill us don’t care about getting paid

Although this concept seems astonishing and against basic capitalist principles, it is often the case. While each vendor is different, a share of the vendors bill us months and months after the fact and often the bills are incorrect and incomplete. Sometimes we have to initiate the process and call the companies to demand the invoices, so that we can match them to the purchase documents and receipts, as well as check the taxes, quantities and costing components. If we don’t reach out to these laggard vendors and push for complete and accurate billing, we will have a crisis on our hands quarterly when we attempt to accrue for what we are owed and sort through months and months of late and incomplete bills and partial payments.

The only time some of the vendors start to care about collections is when the bills are so delayed that the sales teams’ commissions are at risk. At that point the company typically springs into action and is “Johnny on the spot” attempting to reach out to resolve any issues because the sales teams at the vendor have significant power in the organization and complain with vehemence whenever their compensation is at risk.

While some vendors are laggards on collections, they all are focused on closing deals at the end of each quarter so that they can “book” these deals as revenue per accounting purposes. There are criteria that must be met (the hardware must be shipped from their dock) but the firms will generally stay up all night or jump through whatever bureaucratic hoops are necessary to complete the deals for that quarter.

These notes specifically apply to public companies that aren’t in major financial distress. These companies are aligned to GAAP principles, which focus on earnings and not cash collections, so they often don’t stress timely and accurate invoicing and collection of their bills.

On the other hand – private companies or those that have been taken over by hedge funds and other sorts of shrewder operators, are completely focused on cash flow. If you are a private company, earnings matter (especially if you are “prettying” it up for sale) but CASH IS KING. Private equity investors like to pay themselves cash dividends out of the companies they acquire, so they definitely sweat the timing of payments and keep a close handle on cash flow. These same private companies also work strenuously to minimize taxes which stand in the way of dividend payments to the owner.

25 Stories About Work – It’s All About Cash Flow (Part I, Small Companies)

April 12, 2015April 12, 2015 by Carl from Chicago

The USA, early 1990s to mid 2010s

Recently I saw this little blurb in the NY Times business section which perfectly encapsulates one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in all my years of working – it is all about cash flow.

The simplest measure of success for a business is bringing in more cash than you pay out and having a positive bank account balance at the end of the month. When you are in charge of a business and attempting to make your payroll these sorts of concerns should always be “top of mind”.

Cash Flows in a Smaller Firm

When we started our consulting firm you had to put up enough capital to pay salaries for a while (we took a small “draw” to keep us afloat, not our former total compensation) until we were able to bring in cash from customers. However, this is a longer process than you might imagine if you weren’t educated in the realities of all the crucial steps in the chain necessary to get paid. Since we were accountants and finance people we went into this with “eyes wide open” but I can only imagine the types of trouble that creative types meet up with when facing this same conundrum.

Thus our sequence of cash flows at a high level when starting up a consulting firm looked like this:

– Additions – capital contributions from partners. Based on the equity you wanted in the final firm, you needed to put in capital (that maybe you’d never receive back) to start up the firm
– Additions – loans. We didn’t take out loans but we could have. Banks generally never loan you money unless you have collateral and we didn’t so it would have been credit card debt at the time
– Reductions – office space and rent. We needed to start somewhere. Initially we just used a room in our boss’s house, which worked out fine, and later we rented a space near a bowling alley. Note that everyone you are renting from eyes startups with a rueful glance and you can’t expect to get much in the way of credit because they don’t want to end up holding the bag
– Reductions – insurance, legal fees, taxes, office staff, computers. All the ephemera of an office needed to be purchased but we did it second hand. We also used our own skills rather than hiring third parties whenever possible (almost all of the time)
– Reductions – payments to core staff. We used “draws” which were minimal amounts to cover life expenses and in a way were payments in advance of what you’d earn, not like a salary that you receive regardless of the end state of the enterprise and your personal contribution. For office staff we picked up later we needed to pay them a normal salary

All of this happened before we even met a potential customer. Then we needed to fly out and meet customers (we already had a lot of connections; much of our early success came from bringing on existing clients from former consulting firms), convince them to sign us up, agree on a price and contract terms, and then begin doing the work.

25 Stories About Work – TV Knights & Radio Daze

April 11, 2015 by Sgt. Mom

The guys at Far East Network-Misawa in the days of my first duty station in the Air Force and my first overseas tour were a joke-loving lot, much given to razzing each other, with elaborate practical jokes and humor of the blacker sort. Practically none of it would survive scrutiny these days by a Social Actions officer, or anyone from the politically-correct set, either in the military or out. The nature of the job means the successful are verbally aggressive, intellectually quick, and even when off-mike, very, very entertaining. Some broadcasters I encountered later on were either sociopaths, terminally immature, pathological liars, or otherwise severely maladapted to the real world. They could generally cope, given a nice padded studio, a clearly defined set of duties, and a microphone with which to engage with the real world at a remove. Regular, face to face interaction with others of their species was a bit more problematic. But all that would come later. The people during my first tour or two were something else entirely.

25 Stories About Work – New Technology and Productivity

April 10, 2015April 10, 2015 by Carl from Chicago

Oftentimes I can remember clearly the first time I was exposed to new technology. Unfortunately these stories don’t have “light bulbs” going off in my head like in a cartoon; it usually involves me being befuddled and trying to determine why this technology is innovative or even useful.

In the early to mid 1990s I was at a client in Reno, Nevada when the manager on our engagement showed me their “calendar” application. This application let you set up meetings with other employees, or show if you were going to be out of office or unavailable. The interface was very simple (like a mainframe “green screen”) and I kind of stared at it for a while. Why can’t you just call around and set up a meeting at a particular time, I wondered aloud. However, we were consultants, so while we worked all day (and into the night), the client’s staff were forced to attend meetings during most waking hours. It still seemed like overkill to me to have a giant system just to set up meetings, however. Obviously history has proven me wrong and calendar applications are the “killer app” of the modern productivity suite.

At around that same time I was at a client in Cincinnati, Ohio when another consultant showed me a PDF document format. He explained (very patiently, in hindsight) that if you created a PDF and then had a viewer application it would work on every kind of computer, whether or not they had the software that you created the document in. I was confused. Didn’t everyone have Microsoft office? Couldn’t they just open it in word? Once again I missed the big picture.

Email was around for a while but it didn’t catch on fire in our profession (consulting). A lot of this was due to the fact that we spent our days at the client site and the client (where we did most of our work) was on a different email system from our consulting company’s email system. Thus the most useful email wasn’t your firm email, it was the client’s email, because this would let you know when meetings were occurring and get important data from the client’s directly (although we usually used shared drives). I do remember my sense of accomplishments when I sent my first marketing email to a known client in the mid to late 1990s… I was waiting like that kid in “A Christmas Story” who wanted his secret decoder package from Ovaltine for a response to my meticulously crafted email… and of course it never came because I was late to the party and the potential customer had already gotten used to be inundated with marketing email (and ignored it).

25 Stories About Work – When It All Goes Wrong

April 4, 2015April 4, 2015 by Carl from Chicago

The USA, early 1990s to early 2000s

During the course of my career I have been involved in many cases of companies dying, bankruptcy, and other negative corporate events. At times I was there until the bitter end; often I left before the final events occurred but could see evidence of encroaching doom. When you are first starting off as an employee with little experience these signs are harder to understand; as a veteran I can now unfortunately pick them up right away.

One of my first memories as a public accountant was the day that they fired all the administrative assistants. Not the ones for the executives – the ones that helped the new staff get orientated. These women (they were all women it was the early 1990s) ran each of the floors and it was the first time I’d seen anyone get fired en masse. This was before email I think they left us all some sort of strange voice mail or something (voice mail was big back then). It seemed very sad at the time.

In the early 1990s there was a lot of tension in the public accounting firms between audit / tax vs. the consulting side. I was a staff person and was invited to one of the partner meetings (because I played bass guitar but that is a different story) and I could see the vitriol between the two groups. When the audit partners’ asked “how could they help” the consultants the answer was to “get out of our way”. This was not the happy story that I was being fed as a staff person, for certain.

Later that accounting firm went belly up but I was long gone by then. We started up a small consulting firm and it was fantastic for a while. However, it all started to fall apart as key founding members left after a dispute with the main owners over compensation and eventually I was one of those that departed. The departure was even more difficult since many of my friends and family members were also involved with that firm. Unlike most of the other companies in this piece, however, that firm thrives until this day. So we can conclude that I was not indispensable…

At various points during my career I had a “choice” between two firms. Often I chose the wrong one. At the time I didn’t realize that right before you go public, you shave out all of your costs for a quarter or two and you accelerate all the revenue into the current period (to the extent that this is possible and legal, of course) in order to make your company look great for the IPO process. Living in a company that is doing this is very painful and I left but that was before the company became one of the first successful IPOs of the era (a completely unexpected and unprecedented outcome) and I missed out on an opportunity for those founder stock options.

As the dot.com era came to a close there was a giant shake-out in the Internet and Consulting sector. I worked with three companies in succession that eventually went bankrupt. The first of them had an IPO (in the era of voice mail plus a bit of email) and I noted that it was odd that most of the IPO funds raised went to pay out one of the primary investors (they took the cash, we retained the stock). In hindsight of course this was another ominous sign.