“How to Take Control of Your Cash Flow” Webinar re-scheduled

We’ve been doing webinars the last 3 or 4 months in an attempt to make the sales and training process more efficient.  Simultaneously, we cranked up the advertising and marketing efforts, and have created a steady flow of prospects who want to do a better job of forecasting cash flow and future liquidity.

 

We still talk to people one on one – in fact we like doing that.  But as you can imagine, 20 or 30 people attending a webinar helps us leverage our time and reach more people for a relatively low per capita investment in time.   So we’ll continue to do both, and expect the webinar attendance to reach 75 to 100 at a time as we crank up the marketing surge next year.

 

We finally hit on a format that is goes right to the core of a critical need facing small business / all business with “How to take control of your cash flow.”  Philip Campbell, author of the book “Never Run Out of Cash”, explains in plain English the difference between Net Income and Cash Flow, and why you positively cannot run a business well without doing cash flow projections.

 

Then I follow with a very targeted demo of SurvivalWare – first doing an analysis of the latest cash flow for a mythical company, and then going through the steps of creating a cash flow projection for the next 18 months.

 

We had about 20 attendees at the Dec 1, 2008 presentation of this webinar, and recorded it using the GoToWebinar recording feature.  It actually turned out pretty well.  Philip’s part was especially good. (www.survivalware.com/webinars.html)  I decided I needed to improve the dummy data for my demo.  I had used the “data disguise module” in Rusty’s Toolbox to create the dummy company data from a real live customer submission.  Unfortunately some of the randomizing caused weird things like negative cash to appear in a couple of months.  I’ve got that all fixed now for next time, and the numbers actually tell a story now.

 

I’m toying with the idea of working with 100% real live data submitted just a day or two in advance if there are customers or prospects willing to participate.  We don’t have to reveal whose data it is.  But I find real live data more compelling than contrived examples.  The truth is stranger than fiction.  Send me an email if you want to volunteer.  It could be a cheap way (free!) to get your initial data mapped and loaded.

 

So here I am burying my apology for what happened yesterday 6 paragraphs deep.  We had 22 signed up for yesterday’s webinar, and lo and behold with less than 10 minutes to go, I couldn’t get the audio portion to work (basically a conference call number that GoToWebinar provides).  The reason to use their audio service is that they seamlessly include the audio when you record the webinar.  No special microphones or cabling required.  It’s great when it works. 

 

After about the 10^th try, even using a different phone line, different telephone handset, I had to punt. I put up a lame message in a Word document and showed my screen to all attendees.  Anne Briggs is supposed to follow up with a personal email to each today.  Best laid plans and all that.  I am sorry for wasting your time.  Unfortunately, I can’t completely rule out user error.

 

I’ve decided that next time we will have a backup conference call number just in case (and forgo recording the session if we have to).  Also, I’m going to make a renewed attempt to create some pre-recorded webinars of shorter duration, for specific topics like “loading data”,  “Valuation”, or “RMA Ratio Analysis”. Then you can view these at your convenience – no need to sign up for a webinar.

 

So what’s a person to do when you’re so embarrassed you don’t want to show your face?  Well, it was 60 degrees outside in mid December.  I took a nice long bike ride.  The photo below is from a park just north of old town Alexandria, looking up toward Washington, D.C. in the distance.  This was about 9 miles by bike from the world headquarters of Luhring SurvivalWare, Inc.  Not all was lost.