Cash Flow Secrets: Uncover the Lifeblood of Small Business with Jason Kruger

Understanding your company’s financial health is essential, especially if you’re a small business owner. So, how well do you know your numbers? Our today guest will help you get to the bottom of it.

Meet Jason Kruger. Jason is the President & Founder of Signature Analytics, a company providing expert-level accounting and business advisory solutions to small and middle-market businesses. Under his leadership, Signature Analytics was recognized as an Inc. 5000 company for five straight years for growth. Before starting his own company, Jason spent ten years in public accounting. He has over 20+ years of experience in accounting and business advisory, working with mid-market companies and nonprofits, and he now thrives on helping business owners get financial deeper insights and make smarter business decisions.

According to Jason, knowing your business is critical for its success and growth. He believes that through the right financial insights and accounting tools, you can improve profitability, increase productivity and run your company smarter.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about the benefits of knowing your financial records, why cash flow is essential for small businesses, why business owners shouldn’t always be the smartest person in the room, and the importance of understanding every aspect of your business.

If you want to uncover how financial analysis can help you improve your business performance, make sure you tune into this episode to hear Jason’s valuable input.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Jason Kruger

💡 What he does: He’s the President & Founder of Signature Analytics.

💡 Noteworthy: Jason has 20+ years of experience in accounting and business advisory, working with mid-market companies and nonprofits.

💡 Key Quote: “Know your business and know the value of each aspect of your business.”

💡 Where to find Jason: LinkedIn

Key Insights

Understand your business numbers. Knowing your business numbers is a prerequisite to success. It helps you understand your financial background, make better-informed decisions, and ultimately make a profit. Jason explains, “I’m a big proponent of, you’ve got to know your numbers, you’ve got to have good financial information. If you have a budget, that’s even better, but start with solid financial information. From there, then, you can really dig deeper into your finance, into your business, understand how you can pivot or make adjustments to improve cash flow, improve profitability, be more prepared from a business downturn perspective.”

Cash flow is a deciding factor in a small company’s success. When you’re still growing your business from scratch, managing cash flow is critical. Cash is basically the lifeblood of a business, especially for small companies. So, make sure you focus on positive cash flow to achieve your long-term goals. Jason says, “For small businesses, cash is critical. So how does your budget on the income statement side impact your cash and your cash flows throughout the year? A lot of companies, if they grow, if they have fast growth, cash can be a challenge. So we have to understand the investments we’re making and the cash impact on that as well so that we need to know, do we have enough cash to achieve the goals that we need, that we really, truly want to achieve.”

Don’t be the smartest person in the room. As a business owner, you need to surround yourself with inspiring and smart people. And despite what many people think, you don’t necessarily have to be the smartest person in the room when you’re a business owner. Quite the opposite; focus on finding people you can learn from. Jason says, “The business owner has to have that ability to personally say, ‘Okay, hey, you know what? I’m not the smartest person in the room. I want to make sure I surround myself with smart people because, ultimately, my goal is to be over here and grow and achieve these goals for this business. So let’s build this. Let’s build the management team to allow us to do that.’”

Know your business. The most important thing for a small business owner is to know their business to the core. You need to know every aspect of your company and understand every segment. Not that you need to be an expert in everything, but you should definitely know the essentials. Jason explains, “You’ve really got to know your business. You can hire a great sales team, but you have to really become an expert in sales and business development, become an expert in marketing, become an expert in the operational side of your business because yourself or your CEO or as a business owner, you’re still managing those individuals, and you need to make sure you’re managing them to success.”

Top Quotes

“There’s a lot of unknowns. So ChatGPT, we actually have been fooling around with that. It’s created a lot of efficiencies in how we do things, and we’re able to pass that efficiency onto our clients. Our goal is to give them the highest level of value at a cost point that makes sense, so if we can drive their cost down and give them more value, that’s a win for us.”

“Identify if you can use certain levels of technology to become more efficient. And that’s probably the way to go if you’re looking at making heavy monetary investments, make sure you understand what that means in the long term and that you understand the run rate of those investments as well.”

“Digging into the details of the metrics of how that happens is critical so that you really have an understanding from the ground up as to how you’re going to grow your business and how you’re going to achieve those goals.”

“I think for small businesses, my preference is more of the local, regional banks that you can really develop a strong relationship with. The larger banks, if you’re a smaller company, they don’t tend to allocate the resources to you personally that you may need. Smaller banks, you can be a smaller company, and you can have a direct relationship with the CEO. There’s nothing better than that, right?”

“As you continue to grow, they see your financials. They see your growth. They gain confidence in who you are as a person and who you are as a business, so when they’re making a decision on loaning you money, it’s not all about the numbers. It’s about who this person is.”

“I’ve always been focused on achieving the goals that I set out for this company, and so I don’t have an ego about it. If I can bring in anybody that can help us to achieve these goals and surround myself with good people, then let’s do that.”

“What’s important though is that as a business owner, it’s critical to know every aspect of your business.”

“Building the processes internally to support your team, building the right management team and the management structure, and people where you’re not the smartest person in the room, can really take you to that next level.”

Links

Signature Analytics Website

Email Jason at jkruger@signatureanalytics.com