NGMI Category - Amarlo Blog

Simplifying Your Small Business Banking: Why You Only Need Two Bank Accounts

There is power in simplicity when it comes to financial management. Debunk common misconceptions about multiple bank accounts and learn how an efficient two-account system can revolutionize your small business's financial life!

The Right Financial Support for Your Business: Accountants, Bookkeepers, or Something Else?

Understand the distinct roles of accountants, bookkeepers, virtual CFOs, and financial coaches to choose the best financial service provider for your business's growth and success.

Building the Ultimate Business Foundation: Legal, Financial, and Operational Essentials

Learn the essentials of setting up a robust legal, financial, and administrative foundation to ensure your new company's sustainability, growth, and success from the beginning.

Driving Community Transformation: The Role of Successful Business in Positive Change

Discover how successful entrepreneurship extends beyond economic growth, driving personal development for employees, fostering a robust local community, and creating a nurturing environment for the business owner's family.

Why Your Business Needs to Move Beyond Venmo and Cash App

Professional payment solutions offer enhanced compliance, efficient record-keeping, and improved professionalism, making them a vital choice for businesses over consumer apps like Venmo or Cash App.

Navigating the Paradox of Profit: Why a Healthy P&L Doesn't Always Mean Positive Cash Flow

There are critical differences between a company's profit and its cash flow. A profitable P&L statement does not necessarily imply positive cash flow due to factors like capital expenditures and loan repayments!

Unlocking Financial Clarity: The Power of a Customized Chart of Accounts

Customizing your Chart of Accounts (COA) to reflect your unique business needs provides more precise financial analysis and helps drive informed business decisions for growth and profitability. A unique COA is key to the success of your business!

Raising Prices Without Losing Customers: A Comprehensive Guide for Businesses

Understand the reasons behind raising business prices, methods for calculating the new price, and strategies for effectively communicating this change to maintain customer trust and support business growth.

Planning for Profit: How to Take Money Out of Your Business Wisely

Strategically managing owner withdrawals involves understanding your business's income generation, maintaining separate business and personal accounts, setting up a regular pay schedule, and prioritizing business growth through cautious reinvestment.

Collaborating with a Bookkeeper: A Step-by-Step Guide to Streamlining Your Business Finances

Explore hiring a bookkeeper to maintain accurate financial records, support growth, and allow you to focus on core business activities by following a structured onboarding process and establishing an ongoing maintenance routine.

Mastering P&L Statements: A Complete Guide to Profit and Loss Analysis for Small Business Owners

Learn the foundation of understanding and analyzing your Profit and Loss (P&L) statements to help maintain your business's financial health, enable you to make well-informed decisions, and set you up for success when building your business toward sustainable growth.

Unlocking Small Business Growth: 5 Key Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know

Patience, the value of partnerships, embracing imperfection, exceptional customer service, and transparency. These five lessons can help aspiring entrepreneurs navigate the complexities of business ownership and foster lasting success.

The Most Important Things to Consider When Building a Budget for Your Business

Creating a business budget is complicated. Understanding income streams, fixed and variable expenses, and accounting, in general, is difficult. By following these steps, businesses can gain valuable insights into their financial health and make informed decisions.

How Much Money Do You Need to Start a Business? A Useful Guide for Service-Based Entrepreneurs

How do you determine the startup costs for a new business? It's incredibly important to identify the cost to acquire and service customers, understand personal expenses, and make a calculated transition to full-time entrepreneurship.

Do You Need to Form an LLC to Start a Successful Business?

Forming an LLC is not a requirement for starting a successful business, and entrepreneurs should carefully evaluate their options based on their goals, risks, and resources. The are several alternative business structures, such as sole proprietorships, partnerships, and corporations. Here are some practical tips for choosing the right one!

How to Find the Right Accountant or Advisor to Help Grow Your Business

Hiring the right accountant when you start a small business is crucial. The right accountant will ask intentional questions about your business, have the right experience to help solve problems, and a willingness to teach you new information and help you make better decisions for your business.

Business Owners Who Want to Grow Need to Review Their Finances Every Month

Small business owners must understand and review their financial statements at least once a month to keep track of their business's financial health. Reviewing financial statements is essential for success, as the information acts as a roadmap that documents the business journey and provides insights into its performance.

Why Working With Fewer Clients Can be Risky and How to Easily Avoid It

Having a diverse client base is essential for the stability and growth of a business. Learn to avoid the risks of relying on a small client base and the dangers of creative stagnation, as well as how to use pricing psychology to create a diverse range of services.

How to Simply Let Go of a Client Who is No Longer a Good Fit

As a business evolves, it may outgrow its first customers. It's important to acknowledge this situation and make a change by disengaging from customers who are no longer a good fit to ensure continued success.

How to Easily Use Financial Data to Identify Your Business's Niche

Finding your niche is one of the most critical steps toward creating a successful business. Knowing how to leverage your financial data to identify your niche can make this step more manageable!

Why Your Business Budget is Always Wrong and How to Fix It

A business's budget is one of the most critical tools in a founder's toolkit. Budgeting can feel complicated and making financial predictions about a company's performance can be difficult. Accurate and consistent budgeting can make a world of difference in your business.

Are Financial Coaches Good for Advice or Perspective?

Advice can be really useful when you need to know how to do something specific! When it comes to growing a business, there's something more powerful than advice: perspective. Perspective from others in your situation can help you think differently about your issues, leading to game-changing decisions!

Is Redundancy Good or Bad for Small Businesses?

Redundancy is one thing that small business owners actively avoid. Though, it's the one thing that can help small business owners create a more effective team! When you're entirely reliant on one person to get a vital job done, you've got a problem on your hands.

Could New Software Help Your Business Grow?

When running a business, the software you use is a critical component that can help you unlock higher efficiency. When's the right time to introduce a new platform for your team? How do you know it's time to introduce software and automation versus doing something manually?

Do You Need Multiple Streams of Income for a Successful Business?

Multiple income streams are touted as the biggest sign of a successful business by many entrepreneur-influencers. Do you actually need multiple revenue streams when you start your business? Probably not. Instead, focus on creating an excellent service with just one offering. Then, consider how you can add to your offering as your business grows.

3 Important Things to Know Before You Start Your Own Business

Should I start a business? It's a question that many people find themselves asking. How do you know it's the right thing to do, and more importantly, when should you start? Running a small business is no small task. Understanding why you want to start your business and defining what you want to build are critical components of starting with intention.

An Easy Guide to Making Change Happen for Small Business Owners

Entrepreneurs are obsessed with instant results. You want to see an instant payoff when trying out a new system, creating new marketing content, or even hiring a new employee. Oftentimes, it can take 90 days or more to see any significant impact from the new way of doing things! As long as you remain consistent and work to measure what you're implementing, you'll see a result.

Can You Improve Your Business Through an Online Community?

The Internet holds the largest concentration of knowledge that the human race has ever seen. How can you leverage it to create a community around what you're building and change your business forever?

How You Can Easily Grow Your Business With Confident Networking

To some, networking feels like a sleazy exchange of information with the expectation of something in return. Though, networking can help build meaningful, lasting, productive friendships that help you in the long run. How do you make networking effective? What's the best way to meet people? How can I grow my business using networking?

Why High-Quality Bookkeeping Matters for a Successful Small Business

Why are high-quality business services so expensive? Why is it essential to get things right first in your business, rather than taking a shortcut? Skimping on a vital service like bookkeeping often means spending more to get it done right.

3 Ways Effective Communication Can Rescue Your Failing Business Partnership

Business partnerships are like marriages. Finding the right partner who elevates your strengths and fills in for your weaknesses can bring your business to the next level. In contrast, the wrong partner can have disastrous consequences that lead to your business self-destructing. The key to a successful partnership? Communication!

This is Why It Takes So Long to Create a Successful Business

How long does it take to build a successful business? Since most businesses fail within 5 years, it seems like most people think it takes about 5 years for a business to become fully mature. In reality, it can take a long time for a business to fully ascend to the dream the owner set out to make in the first place. So, how do we know when we've arrived?

How to Effectively Use Your Referral Network to Sell a Service

Small businesses don't have the luxury of being able to afford a sales team when they start. Instead, you can leverage referral circles and partnerships with companies adjacent to your customer. When you provide value to the people who already have your customer's ear, they're willing and able to sell your service on your behalf!

What is Team Development and How Can I Grow a Great Team?

There are five stages that every team goes through on their journey. It's a theory developed by Bruce Tuckman. Understanding and identifying where your team is at on this spectrum goes a long way in helping you build a stronger team with clear goals!

What is Pivoting and How Can It Help Me Grow My Business Quickly?

All businesses start like science experiments: there's a hypothesis that you want to test out at first. Every customer helps to prove or disprove your theory! But if your experiment doesn't go as planned, you need to switch things up. Pivots come in all shapes and sizes, all kinds of timelines, and every pivot is different!

What is Market Positioning and Why Is it Helpful for Building a Business?

Positioning is one of the most notoriously difficult parts of marketing a product. When you get it right, the right leads flow in, sales numbers increase, and everyone gets a little happier. When it's wrong, sales and marketing feel like punching a wall.

How to Stop Feeling Stuck as an Entrepreneur While Growing Your Business

All entrepreneurs feel like they hit a wall while growing a business at some point. It's common to feel like things have slowed down and you've become stuck, though it never feels good to admit. How do you go from stuck to unstuck? You can give up, take a break, invite outside perspectives, or reframe your stuckness to move on.

How to Effectively Work With a Coach to Scale Your Small Business

Business coaches can be a transformative force in your small business. To find a great business coach, you must know what to look for. You need to identify what questions to ask. Lastly, you have to be committed to following through with their advice. It's a partnership that can help your business immensely!

What is Lead Velocity and How Can It Help My Business?

Lead velocity is the measurement of how the number of leads that your marketing is generating grows over time. By measuring two periods and counting the number of leads in each, we can calculate lead velocity and discover how effective our marketing is! This metric can help predict revenue growth when paired with conversions, which is helpful when building a brand new business.

How to Actually Conquer the Most Difficult Challenges in Your Business

Solving problems in your business can feel next to impossible. By creating a deeper understanding of your business's financial information, identifying the impact of the problem you're facing, and implementing a measurable solution, you can fix anything.

How to Build Better Processes for Your Business

Life revolves around tasks and processes; in a business, tasks and processes should be clearly defined so that everyone's on the same page! By communicating how things should get done and who needs to do them, you'll reduce confusion amongst your team and ensure that things are running like a well-oiled machine.

How to Grow Your Business with No Money

Despite what everyone on the internet tells you, you can build a business without spending tons of money. It's possible to create content and build an audience, network with other business owners and build a community, and create partnerships with brands that are relevant to the business you're building!

How Do You Change an Industry?

The accounting industry is old and frustrating for most clients. How do you go about bringing change to an entire industry? What role does software play in the effort for change?

How to Say No When a Client Isn't a Fit

Picture this: you're building a brand new web design business and someone comes along and asks you to help them with a graphic design project. It's not your specialty, but you can draw well enough... and your business needs the money. How do you navigate saying no to clients that aren't a good fit for your business, especially early on!?

Why It's Hard to Absolutely Love What You Do for Work as an Entrepreneur at All Times

When you clearly define what's expected of your business by your clients, from your team, as well as from yourself, you'll avoid disappointment and people will love working with you. By communicating what to expect, you can save yourself a lot of headaches!

Why Hiring a Recent Graduate with No Experience Can Transform Your Business

It's almost July and we've had an employee for about a month now, and so far, it's awesome! There have definitely been a few surprises along the way, as well.

How Do You Make a Company Better?

When things get tough, what's the action plan? If you're hoping to fix your small business woes, you've got to start by understanding your finances!

Can Your Business Be Big Enough?

Is it possible for your business to be big enough? When is it time to stop? When do you know you've finished? Let's talk about setting your expectations while growing your company!

When Should I Get a Business Loan? How to Think About Debt

If you're using debt to grow your business, there are a few things to consider. Remember that debt (aka leverage) not only amplifies your gains but magnifies your failures as well. It's a tool that you can use to create incredible results, but it absolutely will not solve your problems!

Where Do We Grow From Here?

We sit down to identify the core issue plaguing Amarlo and what to do about it. Follow along as Austin and Jeremy discuss marketing, sales, and more!

We Got an SBA Loan!

It's growth time for Amarlo. The boys have received some funding from the SBA, so naturally, Jeremy wrote and performed a poem.

What to Do When Your Work Life is Not Balanced

When it comes to work-life balance, business owners get a bad rap. Probably because they're so bad at it. But what does it mean to have a good work-life balance?

What the Heck Do Accountants Do?

Unfortunately, the accounting industry has done a poor job of educating the general public on what exactly accountants do. So, we’re talking specifically about what Amarlo does today!

The Ultimate Sales Strategies for New Businesses

Selling can often feel like an intimidating and scary topic for some. When building a new business, it's important to either find someone who's equipped with sales know-how or to learn it yourself!

The Number One Thing to Focus On In Your New Business

When you're building a new business, there's one thing that you should focus on above all else. It's simple, but often overlooked or overcomplicated. What's the top thing to focus on when building your service-based business? Sales!

What to Consider When Applying for a Loan

It's a week in the life of Austin and Jeremy! An SBA loan is in the cards for Amarlo, but is it the right choice? Should we just suck it up and keep our noses to the grindstone, or is now as good a time as ever to start scaling?

How to Easily Apply for an SBA Loan

We've decided to pull the lever and apply for some funding. While Amarlo is growing at an accelerating rate, we just don't have the cash to keep up! So, we're working with our local SBDC chapter to get some funding from the Small Business Administration.

What to Do When Your Business is Running Out of Money

Reviewing financial information allows you to see how your business has grown, whether you've hit your goals, and even figure out where you'll be in the future. It also helps while creating a plan for your dwindling bank balance!

How to Easily Make Revenue Projections

We use a Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) model to map out what our income is going to look like as our business scales up. With MRR, we can look at trends over the past several months and make predictions that influence the growth of our company. It's like looking in a crystal ball!

What is Burnout and How Can Entrepreneurs Deal With It?

Burnout is one of the most universal aspects of entrepreneurship. It's actually hard to start a business and NOT get burnt out! What does burnout mean? Why does burnout happen? How do you fix burnout?

Why Starting a Business Can Feel Like a Job

When you first start your business, it feels like there are endless possibilities in front of you. You begin to realize that you're facing those endless possibilities completely alone; you simply own your job. How do you go from owning your job to building a business?

This Foundation Will Not Break

How did we go about starting a company? Well, we defined the jobs that needed to be done and identified which suited our strengths. Also, Wendys. Lots and lots of trips to Wendys – it's Austin's favorite.

How We Survived Our First Year in Business

It's time to look back on the year 2021 and see how our little team survived such a tumultuous rollercoaster of a year. We go over our statement of profit and loss, tell the story of the year, and talk about where we're headed in 2022.

Everything We Did Wrong

Last year, we spent over $3,000 on Facebook advertising in an effort to generate more customers. We created lead magnets (free resources), content, and some beautiful ads! Where did we go wrong?!

Video: Our Company Is Not Gonna Make It

We're showing the realities of building a small business by creating weekly videos documenting the growth of Amarlo!

NGMI

Follow along as we build Amarlo, our bookkeeping company, in real-time. We're sharing our journey as we grow!