The Financial Mastery Program

36 Months to Gain the Financial Skills, Knowledge, and Confidence to Become a World-Class Business Person

Register Now

Level One

(Months 0-12)

Goals:

  • To have a clear understanding of your basic company financials.
  • To make the highest leverage revisions to your financial system so that you have accurate and timely financials.
  • To grow your confidence to regularly review and use your financials.

Section A: Your Financial Statements 101: The Basics You Must Know to be a Successful Business Leader

Criteria of Success

  • Have a basic understanding of your Profit & Loss Statement and Balance Sheet.
  • To begin to build a comfort level reviewing your financial statement monthly.
  • The recognition that you can become financially fluent given some time, teaching, and desire.

Learning Modules

  1. Overview of Your Financial Statements: Your Profit & Loss Statement and Balance Sheet.
  2. The 7 Most Important Elements of Your Profit & Loss Statement.
  3. Your “Gross Profit Margin”: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How You’ll Use It.
  4. Variable versus Fixed Expenses: How They Factor Into the Profit Game.
  5. Your Five Biggest Expenses: Why We Start with Elephants.
  6. How to Decode Your Balance Sheet. (What it really is telling you and why it matters.)

Section B: Your Financial Statements 202: Becoming Fluent in Reading Your Financial Statements

Criteria of Success

  • To have a firm grasp of your Profit & Loss Statement and Balance Sheet so you concretely grasp what they are telling you.
  • To understand how your financial statements can distort, disguise, or outright mislead you.
  • To be regularly reviewing your financial statements each month to grow your confidence, understanding, and skills as a business leader.

Learning Modules

  1. 5 Ways Your Profit & Loss Statement Can Lie to You (and how to protect yourself).
  2. The Difference Between “Cash” and “Accrual” Accounting Methods (and why this matters to the health of your business).
  3. Your “Cost of Goods Sold”: How to Nail It (and how to use this information to increase your profitability and cash flow).
  4. The 3 Most Important Things You Can Do Today to Increase Your Bottom Line.
  5. The 6 Myths About Your Balance Sheet that You Probably Believe (and why this is a recipe for disaster).
  6. How You Should Actually Look at Your Balance Sheet. (Yes it does matter and here’s why.)

Section C: Leveraging Your Financial Statements to Immediately Make More Money

Criteria of Success

  • You’ve refined the quality of your Profit & Loss Statement so that you are getting the right financial information into the system and classified the correct way.
  • You’ve improved the way your financial information is set up in your accounting system so that your reporting system easily gives you accurate, timely, and valuable information.
  • You are starting to use your financial information to make better business decisions.

Learning Modules

  1. What You Want Out of Your Financial System Each Week, Month, Quarter, and Year.
  2. FOR YOUR BOOKKEEPER (Controller, or CPA): How to Set Up Your Financial System so that You Get Accurate, Timely, and Valuable Financial Information Out.
  3. Your Monthly Financial Review: What to Look at, Why, and How to Do It.
  4. Three Simple Questions to Ask to Increase Your Gross Profit.
  5. Five Places to Look to Immediately Reduce Your Expenses and Increase Your Bottom Line.

Section D: The Four Core Causes of Financial Danger

Criteria of Success

  • With your growing financial fluency, you now understand the 4 most common root reasons why businesses fail financially.
  • You have diagnosed any of the 4 financial risk factors that may be present in your business and have taken initial steps to mitigate.
  • Your confidence level with your business’s finances is measurably greater than prior to the program.

Learning Modules

  1. Overview of the Four Core Causes of Financial Failure that Every Business Must Avoid.
  2. Cause One: Collections Failure. (First steps to improve your collection system.)
  3. Cause Two: Pricing Issues. (Why you are probably pricing too low and how to fix this.)
  4. Cause Three: Sales Volume Challenges. (The 5 fastest ways to immediately increase sales volume.)
  5. Cause Four: Dissipated Expenses. (What to look for to find your most expensive hidden waste.)
  6. Action Steps to Triage Your Profitability and Financial Health.
Register Now

Level Two

(Months 13-24)

Goals:

  • To use your growing financial savvy to boost your margins and improve your bottom-line profits.
  • To learn how to master cash flow.
  • To formalize and improve your financial systems.

Section A: How to Increase Your Company’s Profitability

Criteria of Success

  • You’ve applied the 5 “Profit Levers” to your company so that you see an immediate increase to your company’s bottom-line.
  • You increase your ability to see your business through the profit lens.
  • You have found simple, low-hanging improvements to increase profitability.

Learning Modules

  1. Overview of the Five Profit Levers ™ (and specifically how to know when to push or pull on which lever).
  2. 7 Ways to Strategically Enhance Your Revenue.
  3. 8 Ways to Intelligently Reduce Your Costs and Improve Your Margins.
  4. How to Systematically Improve Your Collections so You Get the Money You’re Owed.
  5. The Nine Cycles You Must Accelerate to Optimize Your Profits.
  6. Five Ways to Systematically Increase Efficiencies.

Section B: Managing Cash Flow: The Essentials You Need to Know to Keep Your Company Growing, Vibrant, and Safe

Criteria of Success

  • To upgrade your model of how to actually understand cash flow (and why it is not what’s on your P&L)!.
  • To help you master the 10 core causes of cash flow challenges.
  • To give you a simple process to manage your cash flow over the short and medium term.
  • To show you how to leverage your financial team to make managing your cash flow easy.

Learning Modules

  1. The Cash Flow Formula: Why Your Bank Balance Is Not Your Net Income from Your Profit and Loss Statement.
  2. The 10 Core Causes of Cash Flow Challenges (and how to protect your business).
  3. 21 Ways to Immediately Boost Your Cash Flow. (These simple best practices will help your company increase the amount and velocity of money in, and decrease the flow of money out.)
  4. How to Create an Annual Profit Forecast.
  5. How to Create a Rolling 120-Day Cash Flow Projection (and why this is different from a profit forecast).
  6. How to Get Your Staff and Accounting Software to Do the Heavy Lifting in Preparing Reporting to Make Managing Cash Flow Easier.

Section C: Managing by Numbers: Why “Budgets” Serve Strictly Limited Uses (and how margins, metrics, and mindset can save the day

Criteria of Success

  • To understand the three key margins you need to manage (and four more financial metrics that matter greatly).
  • To use the information to take simple steps to enhance your margins.
  • To understand the limits and best uses of “budgets”.
  • To have a clear game plan to manage your business by margin to succeed faster

Learning Modules

  1. The Three Key Margins That You Must Manage to Succeed in Business
  2. How to Optimize Your Gross Profit Margin.
  3. How to Optimize Your Operating Profit Margin.
  4. How to Optimize Your Net Profit Margin (AKA: How to pre-emptively minimize your taxes and lower your true tax burden).
  5. The Limitations of “Budgets” (and 5 specific situations where they are crucial to your company’s success).
  6. Tying It All Together: A Clear Blueprint to Manage Your Business by Margin.

Section D: Financial Pillar Systems 202

Criteria of Success

  • To refine your core accounting system so that you get timely, accurate, and useful financial information every month.
  • To refine your financial controls so that you can safely scale your financial pillar to become owner- independent.
  • To begin to strategically bring key managers and leaders into the financial pillar of your company so they have the information and participation to help take your business to the next level.

Learning Modules

  1. An Advanced Overview of Your Financial Pillar: The 8 Functional Responsibilities that Your Financial System Must Manage
  2. Your Accounting Core: Timely, Accurate, and Useful Financial Reports – The NON-NEGOTIABLES!
  3. Refining Your Financial Controls to Protect Your Company from Fraud, Theft, and Embezzlement.
  4. How to Strategically Share Financial Information with Your Team so that They Can Contribute More to Help Your Company Grow.
  5. Creating Your Plan to Develop the Financial Pillar of Your Company to Have Strategic Depth)
Register Now

Level Three

(Months 25-36)

Goals:

  • To become a financially sophisticated business leader. your bottom-line profits.
  • To be able to see your business through the eyes of a CFO, banker, investor, and a buyer.
  • To use this new set of financial tools to make better, smarter decisions.

Section A: Margins, Ratios, and the Key Indicators Hidden in Your Business

Criteria of Success

  • To be able to see your business through the eyes of your banker.
  • To leverage a “CFO-Perspective” to help you make better, more sound, and more profitable strategic decisions on behalf of your business.
  • To understand the 5 key investor numbers and how they apply to help your company thrive.

Learning Modules

  1. Your Banker’s 4 Key Numbers. (How your banker sees your business—whether you like it or not!)
  2. How to Best Build Deep Relationships with Your Bankers (and the single most damaging thing you can do to irrevocably destroy their trust).
  3. Your CFO’s Nine Most Important Metrics. (These are the technical tools that allow your CFO to see your business with x-ray vision.)
  4. How to Find, Hire, and Best Utilize a Virtual, Fractional, or Full-Time CFO. (And what this will likely cost you.)
  5. The Nine Cycles You Must Accelerate to Optimize Your Profits.
  6. Your Investor’s 5 Key Numbers. (How every owner does—or should—see your business!)

Section B: Your “SGR” and Funding Growth

Criteria of Success

  • To understand how fast your company can grow while internally funding that growth.
  • To determine your company’s compounded annual growth rate, and to understand what this means in terms of your capital needs.
  • To understand the seven main funding sources to pay for your growth (and which one is best for your company)

Learning Modules

  1. No-Man’s Land and Your Sustainable Growth Rate. (How to make sure you have the financial resources to sustain you through the asymmetric, but still predictable, stages of growth.)
  2. Your “CAGR”: How Fast Are Your Really Growing (and what does this mean for your company’s future)?
  3. What Are Your Company’s Real Capital Needs?
  4. The Seven Sources of Growth Capital (and how to understand which source of capital is best for you).
  5. Creating Your Capital Reserve Game Plan. (Creating a simple, step-by-step plan to protect your company as you continue to grow.)
  6. How to Effectively “Shop” for Funding Packages (including how to best present your numbers and company).

Section C: Financial Secrets Savvy Business Owners Must Understand to Maximize Their Wealth

Criteria of Success

  • To understand the core strategies to maximize your “after tax” net income.
  • To make simple changes to pay yourself in the most tax efficient manner possible.
  • How to maximize the value of your company – whether your strategy is to one day sell, transition to owning your company passively, or to continue to scale.

Learning Modules

  1. The Four Core Pre-Emptive Tax Strategies Every Business Owner Must Understand.
  2. The Seven Most Tax Efficient Ways to Pay Yourself (and the 3 most expensive tax moves ignorant business owners make that cost them dearly.)
  3. Creating Your Tax Plan: How to Work with Your Tax Strategies and Financial Advisors to Create a Customized Tax Plan for Your Company and Personal Situation. (Including 12 questions you must ask or you’re putting your financial life at risk.)
  4. How to Win the Valuation Game (and what this tells you about how to best run your company.)
  5. The Financial Steps You Must Take If You Want to Passively Own Your Business. (These are the nine numbers you must look at every month to make sure your company continues to be run the way you want it to even though you aren’t there at the helm each day.)
  6. How Your Company Fits Into Your Larger Wealth Plan.

Section D: Tying It All Together: The Final Five Financial Steps You Must Take to Systematically Apply All You’ve Learned in This Program

Criteria of Success

  • To do a quick review of the five most essential concepts you’ve learned over the prior months in the program.
  • To give you a simple game plan to take what you’ve been doing to help your company on an ad hoc basis and operationalize that so you do it quarter after quarter, and year after year.

Learning Modules

  1. Step One: Make Sure that Your Accounting System Is Rock Solid. (It all begins with accurate, timely, and useful financial information.)
  2. Step Two: Refine Your Three Core Operational Systems: Sales; Production/Fulfillment; and Collections. (When your core is strong, your business will thrive.)
  3. Step Three: Make Profitability a Cultural Bedrock at Your Company. (Profits and putting on your “Business Hat” are just the way you do things at your company.)
  4. Step Four: Consistently Manage Cash Flow. (Especially in times of rapid growth or change, your company’s ability to systematically manage cash flow is critical to your success.)
  5. Step Five: Strategically Plan Your Exit – Scale, Sell, or Own Passively.

Invest Just One Hour Per Month and Master the Financial Pillar of Your Company

You’ll Learn:

  • How to understand and effectively take charge of the financial pillar of your own company.
  • How to build a rock-solid financial foundation for your company so you can sustainably scale.
  • How to master the simple skills and structured framework to run the financial pillar of your company better.
  • How to enhance your revenues, reduce your expenses, manage your cash flow, and grow your bottom-line profits.
  • How to increase your financial competence and confidence.

To learn more about the Financial Mastery Program, either talk with your Maui coach or let us know you would like to learn more by emailing membership@mauimastermind.com

Register Now