Habits of successful business owners -1- They know what's going on with money

I’ve worked with many successful business owners over the past 25 years of being a business coach. Some of them were already successful when they came to me, and some had businesses which weren’t doing so well, but we managed to turn it around.

I’ve been able to work out some of the habits of these successful business owners and over the next 5 days, I’ll share them with you.

Here’s the first one - They know what’s going on with money

I met a man on a plane once who was the accountant for a very successful company. He told me that if he sent the owner a spreadsheet, the next day he would get very detailed questions, often pointing out a mistake in cell C343, or something like that, which showed that he’d been through the spreadsheet in detail.

Not all of us can be quite so detail-orientated or have the kind of brain that can deal with spreadsheets in that way.

But one thing that I have noticed about the successful business owners I’ve worked with is that they know what’s going on with the money in the company. They know how much they invoiced last month, and how much they need to spend in the next three months. These are the people who, when we work on financial targets, know whether they’ve met the target or not. Which is kind of the point of having a target.