ReadOS / Business
Business Finance and Financial Statements — Part 3
Reading statements, understanding cash flow, profit, valuation and financial decisions.
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- 01Key-person dependence: what it costs a business before anyone leavesA business that depends on one person is worth less and grows more slowly, long before they leave. How to find where dependence sits, what it costs and how to reduce it in practice.
- 02Local or offshore manufacturing: comparing the whole system, not the unit costHow to compare keeping production local, modernising, moving offshore or partnering, using total system cost, quality capability, transition risk, dependency and reversibility.
- 03Managing remote and hybrid teams: accountability over availability, daily rituals and the right toolsHow small businesses can run remote and hybrid teams well: collaboration, efficiency and tracking, daily stand-ups, clear outcomes, engagement, meeting habits and choosing simple tools.
- 04Market research on a small-business budget: what to learn, primary and secondary methods, and asking good questionsPractical market research for small businesses: what to learn about customers and competitors, surveys, interviews, observation, field trials, review mining, secondary data and honest answers.
- 05Mitigation and adaptation: cutting your contribution and preparing for the consequencesCutting emissions and preparing for heat, flood and fire answer different questions. How to tell them apart, time adaptation, keep options open and stop paying for the same disruption.
- 06Models rank options, people decide value: trade-offs, efficient choices and what countsA scoring model gives the best answer to the question it was given. How to remove clearly worse options, see real trade-offs, treat weightings as decisions and agree what value means.
- 07Near-certain problems: why the things you expect to go wrong need a budget and an ownerRisk lists drop items once they look certain, so the most likely problems often get no allowance or plan. How to record, price and fund the problems your team already expects.
- 08Negotiating as a small supplier: preparation, walk-away points, trading concessions and protecting your marginHow small suppliers can negotiate with larger customers: research, must-haves and walk-away price, quantified value, anchoring, trading rather than giving, scope creep and contract terms.
- 09Not every return is financial: whose value, who pays and how it is capturedAn investment can look weak to the party paying for it and strong for others. How to map who receives value, who pays and how benefits are captured, without hiding weak economics.
- 10NPV, IRR and payback answer different questions: reading investment measures when they disagreeOne option has the higher return percentage and faster payback; another creates more value. How to read NPV, IRR and payback together, spot when IRR misleads and make the trade-off visible.
- 11Overheads, research and the cost of standing stillHow overheads and research spending reveal whether a business must keep running just to stay in place, and what product businesses can learn from that.
- 12Packaging work before you buy it: when to bundle, when to split and what to keepHow you package work decides who can quote, what interfaces you must manage and what you lose. How to break a project into blocks and choose to bundle, split, partner or keep.
- 13Pay for accepted value, not activity: stage payments, payment claims and buying earlyPayments are control points, not invoices. How to set milestones around verifiable value, assess claims against evidence and decide when paying for materials early is worth it.
- 14Personal finance for business owners: separating money, paying yourself and building wealth outside the businessGeneral guidance for owners: separate business and personal money, pay yourself, set aside tax, avoid borrowing to consume, use compounding and diversify beyond the business.
- 15Porter's five forces and generic strategies for small businesses: reading your industry and choosing how to competeHow small businesses can use Michael Porter's five forces to understand industry profitability and pressures, then choose cost leadership, differentiation or a focus strategy, and monitor competitors.
- 16Price and patience: when great businesses become good investmentsA great business is not always a great purchase. The conditions under which Buffett has bought and sold durable businesses, and the patience the approach demands.
- 17Pricing your product or service: cost floors, customer value, buying units and life-cycleA practical pricing method: know your full cost, choose your market position, quantify the value you create, understand who decides, count the alternatives and price for the life-cycle.
- 18Putting a dollar value on equipment losses: using OEE to guide capacity and capital decisionsAn OEE percentage shows capacity is being lost, not what the loss is worth. How to value downtime, speed and quality losses, focus on the constraint and check before buying equipment.
- 19Reading an income statement like an ownerA plain-English walk down the income statement, line by line, asking at each step what an owner would want to know about the strength of the business.
- 20Recurring revenue and passive income: business models that earn beyond your own hoursHow to move from trading time for money to income that does not depend on your presence: four income quadrants, recurring models, a six-question scorecard and practical steps.
- 21Retained earnings: the quiet engine of compoundingWhat retained earnings are, why their growth rate is one of the clearest signs of a strong business, and why keeping profits only helps if they are reinvested well.
- 22Return on equity, and how leverage can flatter itReturn on shareholders' equity measures how well a business uses its owners' money. Here is how to read it, and how debt and buybacks can make it look better than it is.
- 23Ring-fencing a new venture: decide in advance how you could stop itA new venture funded from the core business can become impossible to stop. How capped budgets, separate structures and a named stop authority protect the core and keep the bet honest.
- 24Rising prices or a bubble? Why valuation is the best clueStrong price rises do not prove a bubble. Comparing prices with earnings, rents and incomes, against history and against reason, gives the best evidence of how stretched a market is.
All chapters preserve the original KEVOS Insights content. These topic-based reading collections are organised alphabetically; chapters may be read in any order.
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