Introduction

Hello, it’s Matt Linklater here and welcome to Link Biz Solutions and our Cash Flow is King Process!

It doesn’t matter whether it’s in your business or in your household, maximizing cash flow is the number one thing that we strive to do. It’s the number one cause of stress, and it’s the number one cause of satisfaction.

The reason we’ve taken the risks that we have in our business is because we want to create more cash flow and provide more value. In our household, it’s the reason we want to live a better life, and create more experiences for ourselves and our kids. No matter what you want and need, you need to maximize cash flow. At Link Biz Solutions, our main strategy is to help you maximize your cash flow.

Have you ever heard of a family office?

A family office is reserved for people who have a net worth of $50 Million or $100 Million. People like Bezos, Gates, and Buffett; they create a family office to employ the Triangle of Wealth…

And why do they do this?

To maximize their cash flow!

Everything is about cash flow. The Triangle of Wealth makes sure…

• You’re paying the legal minimum amount in taxes
• You’re paying the least amount in interest
• You’re paying the least amount in fees for all your investments.
• You’re Maximizing Your Wealth

Why?

When you can maximize the cash flow of all your strategies, all your investments, all your businesses, and that of your household, that’s when you create ultimate wealth.

What we’ve taken is a family office concept and made it into a multi-family office where we work with different families and different businesses who are high income earners and have high net worth, to help them employ the triangle of wealth strategy so they can maximize cash flow.

The first thing that we must understand is, what is cash flow?

For we and our business partners to be on the same page, our spouses to be on the same page, we must start speaking the same language.

CASH FLOW

/ˈkaSH ˌflō/

The total amount of money being transferred into and out of a business/household, especially as affecting liquidity.

As business owners, business partners and as spouses, we all need to know and understand…

• What our cash flow is
• The kind of liquidity we want

The Cash Flow is King process takes you through understanding…

• Liquidity

• How to maximize liquidity
• How to grow your business
• How to experience the things you want in your life and in your household

How do you…

• Maximize cash flow?
• Maximize liquidity?
• Maximize success?

Over my career, I’ve had many business successes and many business failures. And the number one stress for me has been cash flow management.

I used to work in the corporate world, and I didn’t have somebody outside of what I was doing to help me manage my cash flow while I was out there raising money for large insurance companies.

Then as I went in and became a real estate entrepreneur, my biggest stresses were managing cash flow. The hard part is how to manage cash flow and then do all the business activities that you need to do?

1. You’re hunting down business
2. Delivering your products or services

But who’s managing the cash flow?

I designed this Cash Flow is King process to fix my own issues and my own problems because I knew that doing the small things is what makes you successful in business.

When I googled what the number one cause of business failure was?

Inadequate or non-existent planning and inefficient decision making. The most common reason for business to underperform or fail is poor cash flow management.

How do you maximize your cash flow in your business each day, each year? How do you make sure that you’re meeting those goals and that you’re measuring them successfully?

When I googled what the number one cause of divorce was?

Cash flow.

More than cash flow, it’s communication about money.

I know all the time in the past when my wife and I would communicate about money, it would become a stressful conversation. The reason it was becoming stressful is because we didn’t have a baseline understanding of what cash flow meant and what we were trying to do ultimately with our cash flow and our savings.

Although we had clear cut goals, what happened was, we did not have a visual of our household profit and loss, or income statement, so we could have a baseline for that conversation.

When you’re talking numbers too much it becomes an esoteric subject. I’ve found out that most people can’t hold a lot of numbers in their head – it makes it difficult to have a fruitful conversation.

What we did to make sure we maximize our communication and maximize our cash flow and maximize our communication around cash flow and money is, we began understanding…

• What the income sheet of the household was
• What the money coming in and the money going out was and where that money was going

I’m going to take you through our Cash Flow is King process!

We take you through the processes behind…

• Maximizing communication
• Maximizing cash flow
• Maximizing the results that you’re seeing in your business and in your household

That’s where the money is going to, and to provide a better life for your family. Maximizing your cash flow is about maximizing your communication with your significant other.

What kind of results do we see with our cash flow is king process?

It’s not unlikely for us to uncover $500 to $1,500 per month plus. That’s six thousand to eighteen thousand dollars a year that we can put back into your pocket or back into your business or back into your household.

In businesses, our minimum strategy usually puts about $6,000 to $18,000 back into the business. I’ve seen this number as high as $65,000 for somebody making $600,000 in pre-tax profit and I’ve seen this number as high as a $1 Million for people making $13 Million dollars a year.

We did a review of our household expenses in January.

As a result, we’ve put back about two thousand a month in cash flow.

How did we do this?

We did this by…

• Paying off debt that was affecting our cash flow
• Evaluating fixed expenses and finding less expensive solutions

I was recently with some very wealthy people. One is extremely wealthy in net worth and the other guy is a high-income earner. They were just talking about the different platforms for streaming live TV and just that, by utilizing the right strategy, you could save $2,000 plus per year.

HERE ARE THE biggest problems people have with their cash flow:

1. Don’t Know Their Numbers

Two CPAs that I was going to buy last year could not produce their numbers. They took over six months to produce accurate numbers on their business.

This is not uncommon. Your CPA is operating this way.

One CPA wanted more money for his business but his numbers did not allow for it. He did not understand how his numbers should break down. So, not only did he not know his numbers, he didn’t know how to interpret his numbers.

A $1 Million office should have numbers like this…

• 33% overhead
• 33% employee costs
• 33% to the owner

His employee costs were 48%!

When I brought this to his attention, he said, “I need those employees to deliver the services that I deliver.”

I did not disagree with him.

However, he was not delivering enough value to his clients. How could he deliver more value to his clients when he earns more money per client and therefore, his employee cost per client went down to service those employees.

Knowing your numbers isn’t enough. You also have to know how to interpret them

For him, he needed to…

• Cross sell and upsell his clients
• Provide more value or
• Increase his fees

You can only increase your fees by providing more value. The only way you cross sell and upsell is by solving a client’s problems.

He didn’t know his numbers and didn’t understand how to interpret them, and it drastically cost him…

The amount of money he’s bringing over to his family, and I know he was working hard, and number two, it cost him by not understanding the value of his business.

2. Get a Handle on Fixed and Variable Expenditures

We all have fixed expenditures that are not going to change. Our rent, our utilities, whether that be in business or our personal lives. Our employee costs, our equipment costs, whatever that money may be, we have fixed expenditures.

But we also have variable spending. What if the HVAC goes down? What if we need to patch our roof? A family down the street had to patch a roof, or re-do a roof during Christmas time. Five thousand dollars. You know, that’s a tough hit. But, how do you plan for it?

I remember one time when I worked in the corporate world, I had a $5,000 transmission problem on my car. So, how do you plan for those types of things? They’re going to happen. So, how do you put them in your cash flow and how do you put them into your budget? Because typically we know where we are maybe on a weekly or monthly basis, but we don’t plan for those variable spending occurrences. And guess what? They can sting!

3. Get a Handle on Emotional Spending

The other day I was out, and I was paying a compliment to a guy who had a Breitling watch. $10 thousand…Very cool!

He should have a $10 thousand watch. But as soon as I congratulated him, he went into buyer’s remorse mode. He started defending his purchase and his emotional spending.

I think you should have emotional spending. You should buy ten watches. I don’t know what you can afford. You should get whatever you want. However, you should not feel bad about your purchase.

If you want a nice $10 thousand watch one time a year and you’re buying three and you feel bad about two of them, well, let’s figure out your cash flow. Let’s figure out your emotional spending.

And here’s the deal. If you don’t know where you’re spending, you can’t make better decisions. It’s just plain emotional. But then when you put some logic and you put some baseline numbers to it, you can start controlling that emotional spending and decide where you want to spend that money.

I talk about this with my wife. You know, she has some variable spending every month, but she deserves it. She’s in a job that requires her to look and act a certain way and that takes time and a monetary investment.

That takes some investment in herself and that is some variable spending that we needed to understand. When I showed it to her, we understood it and she still does it but by understanding it, we can understand that it’s an investment rather than variable or emotional spending and we have baseline numbers and we can make better decisions.

4. No Plan

When you have those goals and understand that when you have what gets measured, it gets done, you can reverse engineer your success and define your actions.

Here’s our 5 Step Cash Flow is King Process

1. What Gets Measured Gets Done

This is ultimately a goal-setting process and all your goals need to be measured. Now I’m not going to go through setting up your goals and smart goal process. We can save that for another time. But what I really want you to understand is what gets measured, gets done. Everything you need to accomplish in life, needs to be measured.

One time I was at an event and a gentleman came up to me and said,

“I want to be a better basketball player”.

I said, “Show me a better basketball player?”

“You can’t. But what you can show me is shooting 50% from the field and 80% from the free throw line.”

“Right?”

“You can show a measurable increase.”

2. Start with the End in Mind

When do you want to accomplish what you want to accomplish – your goal?

3. Work backwards

You must reverse engineer everything you want in life. If you want a million dollars, you must reverse engineer it.

4. Actionable Increments

Action! Action! Action! What are those small incremental things that you could do every day that creates discipline and accomplishes your goal?

Accomplishing goals is about breaking them down to very small micro-actions that you do every day and that you do consistently. It’s just like if you want to be in shape, it’s that hour a day that you need to make sure that you’re working on your muscles. If you want to have more mental clarity, you say, “How do I work on my mind for an hour a day”.

If you want to have financial clarity and the cash flow we’re talking about, what are those actionable increments that you could put in place to maximize your cash flow?

5. Self-to-Self-Measurement

You measure your incremental success to your plan and to your previous level. When do you want to measure your successes?

Do you want to measure your success on a…?

Yearly basis?

Quarterly basis?

Monthly basis?

Weekly basis?

Daily basis?

The key is to schedule when you are going to measure your actions and your progress.

Cash Flow is King FOCUSES ON 2 strategies…

#1 – Revenue Cures All

The higher you grow your revenue, the higher you’re going to grow your cash flow. If you’re just thinking about cash flow, there’s only so much you can do to maximize your cash flow by cutting costs. The best way to maximize your cash flow is by growing your revenue and so revenue cures all.

Let’s put together and apply the Cash Flow is King process to your revenue…

You remember a minute ago I was talking about that revenue cures all.

Here is the Cash Flow is King Process applied to maximizing your revenue…

1. What gets measured, gets done

$1,000,000 in revenue

2. Start with the End in Mind

12 months

3. Work backwards

$250,000 per quarter

$83,000 dollars per month

$19.230 per week in revenue

Now, that’s not good enough but that’s a bite-size chunk. Sometimes when you think of a million dollars, it seems so esoteric. It seems so big that when you work backwards and move it down to these bite-size chunks, you could start thinking…

“How do I start accomplishing this?”

You could even work backwards a little bit further…

What is your average sale?

How many sales is that per week?

How many sales is that per month?

How many sales is that per quarter?

You could even break that down further to leads.

4. Actionable Increments

Marketing Funnel

Sales Funnel

Etc.

Ultimately, you need to break your numbers down to your actionable increments. What you need to answer is…

How much do you need to fill your funnel?

How many leads do you need in your funnel?

What’s your closing ratio?

On the consulting side, we have an eleven-point strategy that are different and actionable increments to maximize your marketing funnel and maximize your sales funnel and maximize your revenue.

Actionable increments break down to…

ACTION! ACTION! ACTION!

5. Self-to-Self-Measurement

When do you want to measure your progress?

What do you want to measure?

When do you want to measure…?

Every week?

Every month?

Every quarter?

Or every year?

The key is to get started. Get started with the process of understanding the Cash Flow is King revenue maximization model because revenue cures all.

#1 – Profit is King

Now let’s start on some of the Cash Flow is King profits and cash flow into your pocket.

So,

1. What gets measured, gets done

$333,000 in profit or cash flow to the owner

2. Start with the End in Mind

12 months

3. Work backwards

$83,000 per quarter

$28,000 per month

$7,000 per week in revenue

Now, that’s not good enough but that’s a bite-size chunk. Sometimes when you think of $333,000, it seems so esoteric. It seems so big at first but when you work backwards and move it down to these bite-size chunks, you could start thinking…

“How do I start accomplishing this?”

4. Actionable Increments

• Fixed Expenses
• Variable Expenses, etc.

Ultimately, you need to break your numbers down to your actionable increments. What you need to know is…

Are my numbers in alignment compared to the industry?

How can decrease my fixed expenses?

How can I decrease my variable expenses?

How can I provide more value to my clients?

How can I increase the amount of money I get from each of my clients?

Actionable increments break down to…

ACTION! ACTION! ACTION!

5. Self-to-Self-Measurement

When do you want to measure your progress?

Every week?

Every month?

Every quarter?

Every year?

What do you want to measure?

The key is to get started. Get started with the process of understanding the Cash Flow is King revenue maximization model because revenue cures all.

Let me share with you some of the successes that we’ve had with the Cash Flow is King process.

Case Study #1

The first one is a 2-million-dollar business that we started working with about 18 months ago. When we started working with them, their books were in chaos. They had a very complicated business, not because they were making it complicated, it literally has some interesting moving parts that nobody seemed to be able to fix.

Every month this business owner did not know…

• How much money that was in their bank account
• How much money that was their cash flow versus going, to pay the employee
• How much money that was for future contractors for the work being done

This business was managing…

• 300 transactions per month.
• Reconciling those and making sure those were reconciled every month.
• The payment of 41 contractors per month. The contractors were not sending in invoices. They were tabulating the invoices for the contractors and then paying them based on those invoices. So, they had to track 41 invoices.

The resolution was…

• We had to integrate their CRM, their quick books online and their merchant accounts to make sure this was all running smoothly.
• Take away their manual processes.

When you have 300 transactions per month and you’re tabulating 41 different invoices, on those 300 transactions you can imagine the manual processes that went into it and so we had to integrate it through technology.

The results…

We uncovered $5,000 per month in free cash flow.

Case Study #2

I happen to have three different surgeons that have a very similar situation to what we’ve dealt with over the last few years.

Here’s a situation of a million-dollar household. That’s a nice income but what you’ll find is that it is even harder sometimes to manage the cash flow because these types of folks have W2 income, they have s-score income, they might have what’s called K1 income, and then third, they have some investment income.

These folks are working ten, fourteen hours a day. They’re doing surgery. They might be doing some consulting and they might have some investment properties.

The biggest problem…

Managing it All!

The surgeons that we have here are making $800,000 to a million dollars in W2 and typically have what I’d call a side hustle. So, they have an s-score or they’re doing some consulting or some outside work and then lastly, some investment income.

One of these gentlemen had two hundred thousand dollars of passive income. The problem with that passive income was he wasn’t realizing the income – it was being used to pay down debt. He was paying taxes on the passive income, but it wasn’t coming into his cash flow.

For another surgeon, his cash flow was all right but he had a huge tax bill because he was taking his income as a K1 in his name. We had to set up a corporation to increase his cash flow.

The last surgeon from the million-dollar cash flow triad was a dermatologist. We were able to put about $65,000 back into his cash flow. Then we added another $100-$200,000 back in his cash flow, depending on the year, by using a captive insurance company.

Case Study #3

I want to share with you a quick story about some newlyweds who recently came into our office. They were looking to buy a second home. They were putting their lifestyles together, maximizing what they were making, and growing into what was coming next.

As well as looking at buying a second home.

They brought in their income sheet to us on a spreadsheet. They had about $300,000 in combined income and what they broke down was that each of them had about $2000-$2500 per month that they had in variable spending. That’s $5000 per month

So, we looked at them and said, “where’s that $60,000 going?”

And they both looked at us a little bit puzzled.

Understanding that there’s a difference between variable spending and emotional spending is important. It’s not something you can just change because if you don’t understand it, it can impair your ability to make great decisions.

What we wanted to do for them was put them on the software, and share with them exactly where their fixed expenditures and where their variable spending was going every month, because then they can make informed choices.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t keep spending that, do what you want, but the question is, how do you make those choices?

When I was a bachelor, I remember one time that I was wasting some money. I didn’t know where my money was going. I remember I was in Napa and I sat down in an outdoor little garden, opened my computer and realized I was spending $5000 a month traveling and eating out. It was all variable and emotional spending.

Quickly when I realized that, I started making new decisions. That $5000, it’s not that you should or shouldn’t spend it, but once you know where it’s going, you can make better informed decision.

If you don’t know where it’s going, you’re making an unconscious decision. And there’s nothing worse than being driven by unconscious thought to make unconscious decisions.

For me, I was able to put $60,000 back into my pocket!

For this couple who wanted to buy a second home, one interesting thing about this their decision of owning a second home was that they didn’t understand the variable spending of this new home.

They put all the fixed expenditures on the spreadsheet, and we calculated about $6000 in variable spending every year for that second home that they didn’t have in their calculations.

That $6000, if you weren’t planning for it causes stress and second guessing.

Here are the results of the Cash Flow Is King Process

Either you go and do the Cash Flow is King process yourself or you can have us do it for you. But here are the results that you really need to start thinking about creating, whether you do it yourself or we do it for you.

Number one, get a hold of that emotional spending. When you know what your emotional spending is, you can make better decisions. If you don’t know what it is, you won’t be able to make great decisions. You’ll cut down on arguments with your spouse, and your partners in business.

Same thing with variable spending. You know it’s going to happen. You know things are going to happen. So, how do you handle variable spending? And it’s really with a ‘profit first’ mentality. How do you put some money aside for variable spending? How do you put some money aside for when the market takes a downturn? And how do you put some money aside so you can take advantage of situations in your business or your personal life when variable situations come about?

Maximize your revenue. Revenue cures all. You can use the Cash Flow is King process to maximize your revenue. You can use the Cash Flow is King to maximize your cash flow.

Ultimately, what we’ve seen is the 21% or more increase in revenue and cash flow and we typically put $5000 a year or $5000 a month or more back in your pocket.

For the smaller businesses that we deal with, typically, we put $5000 or $6000 back into their pocket every year. The larger the business, the higher the revenue or cash flow.

It’s really about where you’re at and what that means to you. What is $5000 a year to you and what does $5000 a month mean to you? The answer to this question has a lot to do with the size of your business. That’s what the Cash Flow is King process will do for you.

What’s next?

We can manage and help you devise your Cash Flow is King process, customized to serve your peculiar need.

We’ll take you through the Cash Flow is King process to customize it to your specific preferences or specifications, to make sure you’re maximizing your revenue and your cash flow.

• We can provide that monthly accounting for you. We will do everything. We will connect you to the software. We will hook up your different accounts. And we’ll make sure that everything is itemized on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis – whatever it takes to help you maximize what you’re doing.
• We’ll provide that reporting for you. Most of our clients like to get their reports on a monthly basis. Some are okay with it on a quarterly. We can even break it down further like those of our other clients who we have a bi-weekly call with to make sure that they’re maximizing what they’re doing in their business each month and each week.
• One-on-one review. Some want just a monthly reporting, some people want a quarterly reporting. A lot of people like a monthly review and a quarterly review and for other clients, we do it on a bi-weekly basis.
• Accountability and discipline. That’s really what we all do. Even I. I’ve been using different workout strategies my whole life and recently, I’ve been using an app. I go to the gym, I look at my app, I know the workout. It’s easy! Why? Because it makes me accountable. It gives me 7 days a week what I need to be doing and I just look at the app and I’m accountable to it.
• Hit your targets. That’s exactly what accountability does. It helps you hit your targets. If you don’t know where you’re going, how are you going to get there? We want to make sure we can find your targets and help you define an actionable plan.

We’re going to give you

• The Cash Flow is King process
• Monthly accounting
• Reporting, one-on-one review
• Accountability
• How to know what your targets are so you know how to hit them

How to get started

• Give our office a call 312-330-9054
• Send me an email at matt@linkbizsolutions.com
• Schedule a 20-minute call to see if you’re a great fit for the Cash Flow is King Process!

 

Dominate The Day,

Matt Linklater

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