How the Quality of Your Profits Mirror the Strength of Your Heart

If you were to experience the abrupt loss of heart function, whether or not you have been diagnosed with heart disease, the American Heart Association would say that you have suffered cardiac arrest.   Keep the heart pumping, not only to avoid the “the abrupt loss of heart function,” it keeps your blood flowing.  The key to significantly reducing your risk of cardiac arrest is to keep your heart pumping as designed.

You’re more likely to go out of business through ineffective business actions than one failed decision.

The abrupt loss of heart function occurs through heart failure more often than through blood loss.  Bleeding to death from a severed or partially severed artery takes ten to fifteen minutes.  As large volumes of blood are lost, the heart begins to fail until the heart has nothing left to pump.  While this is a morbid thing to think about, it is not a very common cause of heart failure.  Just as you going out of business from one failed business decision is not likely to happen.

The more common cause of heart failure is a combination of lifestyle choices and hereditary conditions.  In any case, your heart’s job is to pump blood to and from all areas of your body.  When your heart is healthy and strong, this process goes unnoticed because it happens naturally, efficiently, and effectively.  Nevertheless, when this vital muscle fails to perform, you have serious problems immediately, just as you do in your business when you fail to follow through on necessary business actions that produce profits.

Your best chance to avoid an emergency application of B-CPR is to practice Step 1—Increase Your Operating Cash Velocity Today.  As your business receives planned cash flow from operations, you get to decide how these funds are paid out for completing activities occurring every day across your business.

Just as poor lifestyle choices eventually create heart health issues, bad business decisions and ineffective actions adversely affect business profitability. Look at the following visual of the human circulatory system through the lens of business profitability:

Step 1 of BusinesCPR™ teaches you how to improve your cash flow velocity, and step 2 is about laying the foundation for improving your cash flow quality.  When you understand your cash velocity and cash quality, you never question why your reported profit differs from your bank balance.

Profits earned are the ultimate reflection of the quality of your past management decisions.

Every business works to earn more in revenue than they incur in associated expenses.  Whether this occurs by strategic intent or by accident, every business will produce “results.”   The ultimate question is whether the results of revenue minus expenses are positive or negative?

Every profit dollar earned is a reflection of the quality of your past management decisions. The size of your profits is the ultimate measure of how your business is performing.

Effective managers use monthly profit planning to facilitate communication so the people on their teams know what to do and what role they are expected to play.  These managers will also visibly communicate how they will know whether they are winning or losing through each month of the profit plan.

How healthy is your business?

If you have shrinking profits and struggle to hold onto cash, take the “free” BusinessCPR™ Business Assessment to learn how healthy your business is.  Click here to take this no-obligation business assessment.  Upon completing the business fitness test, you will receive a risk profile showing how at risk your business is to suffer cash flow and profit problems, the primary cause of business cardiac arrest over the next three years.