On your initial visit to a doctor's office you will customarily be asked to complete a questionnaire concerning your personal and family medical history. Have you ever had these habits or symptoms? Has anyone in your family ever had these diseases? Why the negative questions? They are helpful diagnostic tools for determining conditions,...
Fundamentally all management decisions boil down to return on investment decisions. What's the cost of this program and what's the expected benefit? What's the monetary payback of this decision in relationship to the resources invested? How much time will I have to spend on this project and are the anticipated results worth the effort? Return on...
"Decision making" is the work of the manager. "Bean counting" is thought to be the work of the accountant. To many non-financial managers accounting remains an unsolved mystery,a burdensome boring necessity of business. Accounting, however, has a second dimension in addition. Managerial accounting is as indispensable to the "decision maker". as...
How much is too much? How much is enough? What's fair and who decides? Only the marketplace knows. Compensation decisions are some of the most important and difficult decisions that business owners have to make. Ultimately, the amount of money available for compensation is determined by the value the market place is prepared to pay for a...
Despite the continuation of moderately positive economic indicators, questions about an economic slowdown and possible recession are frequent topics of conversation. Why the concern? Well, perhaps it's because nothing lasts forever and we all realize that the current period of economic growth has been one of longest. Every winning streak...
The total revenue of any product or service is a function of the price and the quantity sold. The "law of demand" states that there exists a negative relationship between price and quantity demanded. That means, if the price goes up, less will be demanded, as the price goes down, more will be demanded. When shown on a graph for a range of prices,...
It's that time of year again. The big companies started "doing it" awhile ago. Most smaller businesses are just getting started. Some will still be "doing it" in January and some others won't even give "it" a try. "It" is the annual budget. Not everybody who is "doing it" is enjoying it and few are benefiting from it as much as they should. Take...
Pricing is the neglected orphan of business. There is no more important decision a business will make than the pricing of its products. Revenues minus expenditures yields a remainder commonly referred to as profit. Revenue is the product of price and volume. These simple formulas highlight the prominence and impact of pricing. Product quality,...
The torch of business leadership is passing from the generation that lived through the depression to the generation known as the "baby boomers". Despite the obvious age differential , the attitudes of the two generations on a variety of business issues are remarkably similar. On one issue however, their experiences and attitudes show a marked...
It is a pretty straightforward matter to check the value of your IBM stock. Just pick up the morning paper and bingo, you have the daily value of most any widely held, publicly traded stock. What about the value of your shares of stock in a closely-held corporation? This is not such a simple matter. Your shares may represent 100% ownership of a...