Many of my recent postings here have addressed headlines that were featured in national media articles.  From Time Magazine to The Wall Street Journal, so many articles paint a picture of an economic recovery – or, at least, the beginnings of one.

My sense is that for most small businesses the economic conditions will improve, but at a painfully slow pace.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday, a very capable consultant in the Philadelphia area who shares my passion for helping small business owners grow their businesses.  Scott’s view reinforced the point that the recovery will be slow.

So, in an environment where the economic conditions are slow to improve, and help from our federal, state, and local governments and banking institutions will be slow to come and never enough, how should small businesses think about how to create a positive path forward and where to get the help?

We will create a positive path in the same way we always have; from within ourselves, and our community.  It’s why we started our businesses in the first place.  We wanted the ability to determine our own courses, focus our creative energies in the most positive and productive ways, to create our own companies.  We could do it better ourselves and have a chance to build something of value in the process.

I’m proud to be part of this community, where we find solutions.  Every day!

One of the reasons that an entrepreneur strikes out on their own after leaving ‘cubical nation’ is to be rewarded (a.k.a. paid) for doing what they love.  The Small Business Administration takes this idea to a whole new level every year with National Small Business Week.

Covering topics such as Entrepreneurial Development, Small Business Lenders, State-by-state winners for Small Business Person of the Year, and National Small Business Champion, the awards are designed to showcase the best of small business, provide incredible visibility and networking opportunities, all while rewarding entrepreneurs for doing what they love. (How often does that happen?)

As Carol Tice of Entrepreneur Magazine notes, running your own business is long on work and short on glory, so wouldn’t it be nice to have the chance to get a little bit of kudos for helping lift the economy back to its feet?

Time is short, however: the application deadline for entry is this Friday, November 13.  The celebration will be held in Washington D.C. next May 23-25.  (Last year’s celebration videos are available online.)

Managing cash is one of the biggest challenges for small businesses. Business owners want to always have enough to pay their employees, vendors and creditors and have money left over to grow their companies or finally pay themselves. The key to accomplishing this is cash management. Cash management, simply stated, is the management of cash in and out of your business.

Cash is the total of your checking, savings, and petty cash accounts – what you can withdraw from the bank and use to pay for things today. It is not inventory: it is not equipment (though you could sell those for cash, they are not, in fact, cash).

Profit is also not cash. Profit is actually easier to predict. By comparing periods and averaging activity using the income statement, you can pretty closely spot trends in what you sell and what you spend so you can estimate what you will likely earn or spend in the future because Revenue – Expenses = Profit. But cash is different than profit. You can be running a profitable business according to the books but struggle with cash flow. For example, your income statement says your profit for the month is $3000.00 but your bank accounts say you have $300.00.

Good cash management is simple with WorkingPoint. Dashboard widgets and reports help you gain clear insight into your financial position by knowing when, where and how your cash needs will occur.

This week, I’ll identify the top 3 things you can do the better manage your cash and how WorkingPoint can help.

Starting today, with tip #1: Don’t Tie Up All of Your Money in Inventory

One of the biggest mistakes product-based businesses make is that they tie up their money in too much inventory or inventory that is outdated. Practice the “Just-in-time” inventory method for products that are readily available from your vendors so you can place smaller, more frequent orders instead of one huge shipment that wipes out your cash.

WorkingPoint can help you keep on top of your current quantities and your inventory valuation (the total value of your inventory). To check what you have in stock, take a look at your Items List. Filter it to show Inventory Items and you have a Stock Status report that will show you what you have on hand so when you get low, you can reorder your items.

You can also run your Balance Sheet report to see what the total value of your inventory is. This will tell you how much money you have tied up in your inventory. You may decide that you want to keep a certain amount of inventory on hand and once you reach that limit, you can run a promotion to help reduce your inventory before ordering more.

By managing your inventory with WorkingPoint, you’ll keep your cash longer and you won’t be locked into selling something that just went out of style.

This morning on Venture Beat’s Entrepreneur Corner, serial entrepreneur, Scott Olson, posted an article, “Excel where your competitors suck.” In the article, he outlines a recent customer experience he had that, by nature of a contrast, made a competitor look really good.

How often does this happen?  You stand in line somewhere, frustrated with its slow pace or disappointing final result.  And instead of walking away satisfied, you walk away annoyed.  As a consumer, this is aggravating.  As an entrepreneur, though, this is a great opportunity.

In his article, Scott highlights the value of taking advantage of your competitor’s weakness to make inroads with new customers.  Obviously this is a potential acquisition opportunity, since most people don’t go to a new vendor, they leave an old one.

But I’d suggest that Scott’s point needs to go a step further: one of the keys to thinking like an entrepreneur, is to train yourself to recognize opportunity by creatively pairing problems with solutions.  More often than not, the best opportunities that jump out at us — whether they are examples of someone doing something really right, or really wrong — are in businesses that are totally unrelated to ours.  They are all fair game.

Just like the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercials proclaimed: the power is in the combination of great ingredients to make a better end result.

A great example is the video rental business: thanks to Netflix and Redbox — two businesses with unique customer service propositions compared to the old video store model — Blockbuster expects to close as many as 40% of its stores over the next two years.

It was a true sign of entrepreneurial ingenuity that took an old idea (watching movies at home) and added a new twist (Netflix: mail order and Redbox: vending machines).  And because of legacy business issues — everything ranging from expensive infrastructure, to complex legal restrictions, to slow-to-change business ideas — Blockbuster has simply been unable to compete.

How many times per day do you see someone else’s business screaming out ideas at you, for ways to make yours better?  How do other businesses you encounter serve customers better or faster?  How do they make a compelling value proposition to be able to charge a higher rate?  How do they get their customers to be their brand evangelists and provide great word-of-mouth marketing for you?

Entrepreneurs are a scrappy, creative group.  And when you keep your eyes open, you’ll see great opportunities all around you.

What good ideas have you seen recently that you can put to work in your business?

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Michael Viscusi of mv | creative:

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Kathy LeClaire of Metro Home Manager:

There are a ton of cool things about working online but one of the things I get frustrated with is that I can only have one page of my WorkingPoint account open at a time. Right? Wrong. Web browsers make it possible to have many pages open of the same application or web site. With a quick little browser move, I can have several pages of my WorkingPoint account open at the same time. This saves page load time and lets me compare reports and accounts, view reports side by side, view customers side-by-side, view anything alongside just about anything.

If you are like me and you’re living in a single page world, try this neat trick yourself:

• Go to the first page you want to have open
• Then, hover over the link for the next page you want open and right-click
• A menu displays and you can choose Open Link in New Window or Open Link in New Tab
  o If you choose Window, you’ll be able to minimize them both and view them side-by-side
  o If you choose Tab, you can click over from one to the other quickly

The more time you spend with WorkingPoint, the more ways you’ll find that it can help your business.

The other day, I showed you how to use the Income Statement to make projections for future earnings by averaging your monthly sales so you can spot trends in how your money is coming in, like whether it is driven by season, product line or strategic marketing events.

Just like making projections for future earnings, the Income Statement helps you budget for future expenses. Follow these same steps for comparing your expenses and you’ll see how you’re spending your money on a monthly basis so you can budget for future month’s expenses.

To do this:

1. Go to the Income Statement.
2. Choose a date range you want to compare, for example, This Fiscal Year-to-date.
3. From the Compare Periods drop-down menu, select a period, for example, Month. This will break out the Fiscal Year-to-date into months.
4. Evaluate the Report:
   • Take an expense category, like Advertising, and average a few months to calculate what you typically spend in a month in that category.
   • Average your total expenses and see what it takes you to run your business on average so you can figure the minimum sales goals you need to hit each month to stay above water. But why just survive when you can thrive? Use the minimum you need to cover expenses as the base for calculating sales goals that increase your profit by double digits.

By reviewing what has happened in the past you can more confidently plan for the future. For more information on the income statement report, check out our online Help Center.

My recent postings here continue to be “timely,” thanks in large part to Allan Sloan, author of the latest Time Magazine cover story currently available on newsstands today.  His article, “Why Main Street hates Wall Street” covers several key points about the advantages enjoyed by the big guys on the Street and how little guys – like you and me – can justifiably feel like we’re playing with the deck stacked against us.

As one could expect from an article by a huge media concern (designed to sell copies and provide as much analysis as possible in a few pages), it presented some issues but lacked closure, and certainly didn’t form a unified “voice” of Main Street.

Far more refreshing was my meeting last week with executive members of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, who hosted a round table discussion for some local small businesses CEOs.  Far more than just treating a half dozen of us to a nice meal, Steven Falk, President & CEO of the S.F. Chamber of Commerce, listened to us describe our issues of starting and growing a small business in this city.

What a concept!  Want to know something?  Ask questions – and listen to the response!

It’s hardly surprising that the straightforward approach above was taken by Mr. Falk, as he was previously publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle for a number of years and clearly knows what journalism is all about.  Where Time seized the national headline, I’m betting on Steve to help create a true voice for small business owners.

For the record, my agenda is simple.  I’m neither “anti big business” nor “anti media.”  I’m PRO small business; those tiny, homegrown, “micro” businesses that are just starting out.

Like Steve, I am not new to this, bringing decades of relevant experience to the table.  For millions of small businesses, I also offer a solution.  Try WorkingPoint, the complete, comprehensive, high quality – and free – online business management system, and help us create a unified voice for Main Street.

When you want to see how sales have been performing in your business, check out your Income Statement report. By reviewing this report, you can spot trends in how your money is coming in, like whether it is driven by season, product line or strategic marketing events.

Here’s how:

1. Go to the Income Statement.
2. Choose a date range you want to compare, for example, This Fiscal Year-to-date.
3. From the Compare Periods drop-down menu, select a period, for example, Month. This will break out the fiscal year into months.
4. Evaluate the report:

• Average your total sales and see what your selling on average each month overall. Take the total sales figure for your Revenue Accounts and divide by the number of months reporting.
• Do the same thing for Quarter. Take January, February and March and add them together. Then divide the total by 3 to see that your business averages in sales during the first quarter of the year. Repeat for other quarters or other periods, like years.
• Figure your Average sales per month by Revenue account. If you have multiple product or service lines and track them on your Accounts list separately, compare sales for each account each month to see your trends at a more detailed level.
• The longer you use WorkingPoint, the more data you’ll have to compare – like by months to see if trends develop by season by comparing, say – summer: June, July and August this year with last year.

There’s lot of ways to slice and dice your data to get more insight into how your sales are doing. The key is to take action on what you learned. If sales are down on average in June, plan a promotion for that month to boost sales. If find your biggest sales time is near Groundhog Day, plan a promotion around that time too. You know what they say – “Market your business when it is slow, market your business when it is busy.”

By reviewing what has happened in the past you can more confidently plan for the future. For more information on the income statement, check out our online Help Center.