What is my product and how does it help you?
Hi! My name is Ben Green. I’m a 23 year old living in NYC who wants to help individuals and small businesses reach financial freedom. I’ve created a tool to create a blueprint for success and give you real time insights into your business, and it’s all in google sheets!
My goal is to take all of you on my journey as a business owner, as i teach you what i learn along the way. Below you can see what i’ve built so far to help create a blueprint for success.
Dashboard
Everyone conceptualizes and understands information differently. Some people prefer text explaining key takeaways and insights, some prefer to look at the actual data and numbers, and others prefer a more visual approach with graphs. Dashboards are a great way to tie everything together and create visual and actionable insights. In this tool, i have provided you with a dashboard with graphs of all the major tables in each of the accompanying sheets. These graphs will also have a box for insights to clearly show key takeaways.
Budget
Budgets are one of the most important parts of the financial well-being of a business. A budget is a forward looking plan (typical time horizons are one (1) to three (3) years), of where your money comes from and how it is allocated. Where you allocate your money is a representation of your priorities and importance to your business so think hard about how much you allocate to each account to make informed decisions based on past behavior and your future outlook.
You want to begin the yearly budgeting process a few months before your calendar year is to start. Once the budget is set and the year begins, you should have have periodic reviews to do a health check on your expenses to see anywhere you may be over/under spending to make adjustments based on evolving conditions (e.g. rent went up, switching utilities providers, increased marketing budget, etc.) all resulting in greater accuracy.
If you have planned correctly, setting a budget also creates a guideline for your business and outlines a goal to strive towards based on a business model that mathematically works. Ideally, the budget you set is highly accurate and will never need to be adjusted. However, it is likely that during this periodic review process (initially once a month but can eventually become quarterly) you will see adjustments may be necessary.
The included budget tool will give you an outline to create this financial plan. It will also show you how you are performing across all of your accounts based on your YTD performance to show you any expected surpluses or deficits. The budget sheet has sections for you to plan out the following areas
Revenues
Fixed Expenses
Variable Expenses
Track Bank Accounts
Cash Flow Tracker
Tracking cash flows helps to understand the health of a business or individual, and the level of detail in which they are tracked determines the insights into your business you can view and create strong data to generate these insights. Data helps tell a story, so this sheet is important to maintain to ensure you can generate insights into your business since the data you input is used as a base of calculations for all projections and tracking. You can use data in this sheet to track many different things
Real time insights into your sales/expenses broken down by your budget categories broken down by month
Bank account balances
Investing returns tracked across different portfolios
Portfolio weightings by industry/sector
Loan/Receivable payments
Inventory tracking for different items
Breakeven analysis to determine sales goals
Individual services/product sales analysis to analyze customer behavior
Balance Sheet
A balance sheet is a snapshot of your finances at a certain point in time. It can show you how many Assets (Resources you own that can be used now or down the road for financial gain, such as a vending machine that brings in sales), Liabilities (Assets you have committed to paying to someone else, such as cash you have committed to paying in a loan) and Equity (Your Net Worth, the difference between Assets and Liabilities) you have. It is linked to multiple sheets in the spreadsheet and will update automatically as your investments change and as you make entries into the Cash Flow Tracker.
This sheet gives you a breakdown of your finances from five (5) different points of view (assuming day 1 of planning is 7/1/2021 and today is 8/31/2021)
Current (8/31/2021)
Planned 1 year from the day of planning (7/1/2022)
Projected 1 year from the day of planning (7/1/2022)
Planned 1 year from today (8/31/2022)
Projected 1 year from today (8/31/2022)
Portfolio
Managing your stock portfolio is a great way to build long term wealth. Now that doesn’t mean you should be checking it on a daily basis and constantly making sales. Managing your investments means a few things
Developing a strategy
Diversifying
Having conviction with your investment
This tool will help you manage your investments by tracking your returns across multiple different investment accounts, as well as helping you rebalance your investments across whatever categories you choose. The sheet will update automatically as it will pull in data from google and yahoo finance.
Inventory and Product Analysis
Managing inventory is imperative since it’s really just money sitting around in a different form. It’s tough to predict demand, but you always need to make sure you have a strong understanding of how quickly you move products and are able to satisfy demand. To make this possible, you need to track your sales data to help influence your purchasing decisions.
In this tool, you will be able to track your products in numerous ways
Track current inventory levels are
Track sales for each product broken down on a monthly basis
See the margins and profitability for each product
See a ranking of your products to see what your breadwinners are
Services Analysis
Understanding the costs that go into running a service are tough. Everything is done at such a high level and the costs are spread across many different transactions. In some cases, businesses may be undercharging for their services because they don’t know the true costs associated with it.
This tool gives you the ability to track and measure your services on numerous levels, similar to the inventory and product analysis
Calculate the cost for each service to help set prices
Track sales for each service broken down on a monthly basis
See the margins and profitability for each product
See a ranking of your products to see what your breadwinners are
Tracking this sales data will give you crucial insight into your customers purchasing behavior. If you don’t know what sells the best, how are you going to know which items to sell?
Breakeven Analysis
This analysis tells you how much of a certain good/service you need to sell based on your business model (customer behavior and fixed/variable expenses) to breakeven and not be losing any money. This is calculated by taking all of the fixed expenses and dividing them by the variable profit per sale.This then calculates the number of units of sales you need to do to cover all of your fixed costs. For example, you have $100K in fixed expenses. You sell a good or service for $100, but that good cost you $50 make or cost $50 to perform the service (variable expenses), so each good/service profits you $50. Based on that, if you want to breakeven, or makeup the total amount of the fixed expenses you are going to be paying, you need to sell 2,000 units of that good or service to your customers ($100,000 Fixed Expenses / $50 Variable Profit). This is a basic example, and this sheet uses the inputs of your cash flows to calculate these amounts for you and churn out whatever the equivalent breakeven is for your company (AKA it will give you your own version of that 2,000 number from above) based on your budgeted and projected amounts, as well as real-time amounts based on anything logged in the Cash Flow Tracker.
The breakeven and sales analysis concepts are intertwined and help businesses figure out different benchmarks they need to work towards, since it is essentially figuring out how your revenues can cover your expenses. These benchmarks can be found in the Profit Tables to show how your profits would vary at different levels to help set goals for yourselves and conceptualize what that actually means. This will help you understand what it means to make $100,000 in profit based on the revenues and expenses of YOUR BUSINESS- is it selling 500 goods? 5,000 goods? 25,000 goods? 100 haircuts? 1,000 haircuts? 10,000 haircuts?
A breakeven analysis is basically just looking at your business from a y=mx+b formula. Y is the projected profits you have, M is the variable profit you make for each sale, X is the amount of item/service sales you make, and B is the amount of fixed costs you have. Your breakeven analysis is based on all of these factors, so you can actually plot a function of how profitable your business will be!
Loan/Receivable Tracker
This sheet is meant to track both money you owe to people and money people owe to you. It is meant to have the typical info a debt agreement would have, and all payments related to it are tracked in the Cash Flow Tracker and are updated automatically.
When paying back loans, everyone likes to take a different approach- either paying off the bare minimum or overpaying to just get the debt out of your head. From a financial perspective, as long as the expected market return is from the stock market is higher than your interest %, it’s better to pay off the minimum amount due without incurring extra interest and putting any excess money into the stock market. This is because your money can grow to more than the interest it is you owe, and you can technically make more money over time
Marketing
Marketing is one of the toughest aspects of running a business. It requires strategy, ongoing maintenance and it isn’t cheap. Not only that, but developing a strategy isn’t always so clear cut- you need to do a lot of research on numerous areas, such as
Customer Base
Target Market
Competitors
Industry outlook & emerging technology
After figuring out the approach you want to take, the next step to improving is by tracking how your approach has worked to see what adjustments need to be made. To figure out what is/isn’t working, there is one thing you will need a lot of- data. Having strong marketing data, such as analytics on your digital ads and knowing which marketing channels yield the greatest results is imperative. This data will help you allocate your time and money to the most effective areas. Once you know which routes you want to take, you should plan out your marketing calendar to hold yourself accountable. Managing marketing is a full-time job and is often outsourced to specialized marketing firms, so if you are going to take on this responsibility you need to be on your A-game. If you do decide to outsource your marketing, it is going to be quite expensive. However, the trial and error of marketing is a time and money intensive process. There are plenty of marketing firms that are out there that can run paid ads for you and figure out the optimal channels to acquire new customers if you think it makes sense for you.
Developing a brand is more important as your business grows. A brand is how customers perceive your business- are you a business that is meant to spark joy in their lives? Help raise awareness for a cause? The brand is how you make sure your message and purpose gets across. This could be maintaining PR to be sure you have good news come out, incorporating a slogan into each piece of marketing content, or sponsoring an event that aligns with your values and that your target market would resonate with. Getting involved in your local community is a great way to build your brand to show you care about your customers.
This sheet is setup to project marketing expenses based on your scheduled marketing calendar- on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis. Please see below for a breakdown of how to think about a marketing plan
Event- Input a short description and name of the event;
Time/Effort- Input the minutes (e.g. 45, 60, 90) or hours (e.g. .75, 1, 1.5) you expect this activity to take;
Expense- Input what you expect to spend in the chosen time period for each event;
With these inputs, you will be able to see expected expenses for your planned marketing calendar as well as an expected time dedication for all of your marketing efforts to see if this plan is actually feasible. This will help determine if you should perform marketing yourself or outsource it.
