DETERMINACIÓN DE LAS ÁREAS DE TRABAJO NECESARIAS

Until you are big enough to have full-time financial folks managing your ac-counts, you are likely to end up hiring outside companies or individuals by con-tract to help you to keep everything in order. Especially when it comes to han-dling your taxes, a CPA or accounting firm is really important.

My experience is that these professionals are not going to understand the nuance of what you are doing with your business financially, and will not come near to fully grasping your story—even if you document everything and spell it out for them. These individuals are not close enough to the decisions that you make every day, and have made in past years, to really get everything, unless you press the point and follow up on every detail. A CPA falling off the turnip truck and missing a few details can have tremendous consequences for you—

and none of them good.

A CPA that I know provided the following insight into the mindset that comes with a client relationship when handling the books: CPAs will take the path of least resistance, which means erring on the side of safety (and thus higher tax) if they do not explicitly understand any particular detail of your financial story.

This means they are primarily interested in avoiding regulatory mistakes, and much less interested in making sure that you get every penny that you could reasonably claim.

This has happened in my businesses repeatedly and has been a drain on fi-nances and time. So what to do?

• Because you are going to have to push your financial folks on certain details, this means that you have to know some-thing about tax law and financial law. You cannot farm out everything to your CPA. Find out about recent changes to tax law and the best strategies to navigate it.

• Prepare your documents carefully.

• Make a checklist of your assumptions and ask for an initial by each point from your CPA.

• Ask questions frequently—I have always ended up saving a lot of money in taxes when I stopped to question my CPA’s assumptions.

• After you have asked, if you have any lingering concerns, ask again. If they don’t like your attention to detail (many won’t), then find another firm to represent you.

Vendors

Another important group of team members comes in the form of the various vendors and service providers that you will develop relationships with over time. I have found that vendor relationships tend to evolve to into highly valu-able (even critical) symbiotic relationships over time. Such types of relation-ships include those with wholesale distributors, advertising partners, and soft-ware and equipment providers.

My advice for this type of relationship is to treat your vendor partners (the people) in a very considerate manner. Treat them with respect, share informa-tion with them, and stay on good terms with them even when times are tough.

Appropriately, as I write this section of text, I am sitting on the patio of the Sand Hill Resort in Silicon Valley, having just participated in a Google-sponsored networking event. I am here because of the relationship with a ven-dor (my Google sales rep), and the fact that we just worked through a tough licensing discussion a couple of months ago.

Some years ago, during a period when I was involved in online retail, we devel-oped relationships with our wholesale vendor reps that were critical to our operations. Through strong relationships with the vendors (the people, if not the companies in question), we were able to get increased discounts, extended credit, and even information on the buying patterns of competitors. This was a

feature of our personal relationships with our reps. We would even send baskets of chocolate and baked goods to them during the holidays. I remember us discussing how that was always the best $80 we could spend.

Other businesses I have been involved with have gotten early access to new products, marketing exposure, special assistance, advice, and even intercession with unrelated issues where our vendor reps had connections. Vendors are potentially very valuable allies—and they should be because they need your business. Don’t let the fact that you send them money or have options with other competitors find you complacent or dismissive of these folks. Keep your options open, honestly communicate if you have issues or problems, and nego-tiate hard on price, but keep the human relationship well maintained. It is good karma, it’s the right thing to do, and it has the potential to benefit you and your company in ways you may not expect.

5 Communication Matters

What is the purpose of communication? In business, the desired outcome of communication is to get work done (internal) or to generate revenue (external).

I have a great interest in communication as it pertains to business. A few years ago I conducted a research project on communication in international projects that included nearly 100 engineers and managers from over a dozen compa-nies. The underlying thesis of this study was my belief that communication is the most critical component for effective management of teams.

If you are an experienced manager, or simply have a good imagination, this should not come to you as a surprise. Of course, communication is vital—it is the glue that brings individuals together into a team. Whether it is communi-cating a value proposition with customers, a strategy to management, or de-tails of a plan to a team, communication is one linchpin that you must get right.

No two ways about it.

Repetition

When communicating an important message to your team or to your custom-ers, it often pays to first decide what the important core of your message is, and then plan ahead of time for ways to repeat that core message again and again to your audience.

When communicating with your customers, plan to tell them the message and repeat it. Repeat. Repeat. Pick the most valuable message and focus on it. Have salespeople tell the customer, have your web site tell your customer, and have printed materials tell your customer the same message. Phone touches should repeat the message. Pick your most important message and repeat it until the customers get it. It may take ten messages before they get it. Keep at it.

Training and management are the same way. Managing thought and understanding in teams will find you needing to repeat and reaffirm those things that are important in your organization again and again.

Here are some examples:

• In an engineering project, I verbally repeat the objectives every time we meet. The team has heard the objectives 25 times by now, and we are just getting started.

• For marketing, there are mantra-like objectives that the team has heard from me repeatedly, such as “provide value” and “don’t bury the lead.”

• For management, the repeated patterns include “What is the specific intention?” and “How will we make money with this?”

It is not enough to simply tell somebody something. If it is important, repeat it until they get it. (Even once they have gotten it, it is still advisable to repeat it as long as it continues to be important, just to make sure.)

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