Managing your money - Soul Trader interviews - Rasheed Ogunlaru // Coach - Speaker

Managing the money and finance side of things as a sole trader, small business owner or freelancer can be one of the most challenging and rewarding things. While understanding and managing the money side of things is a skills that many business owners have – often from a previous career – it is far from something that everyone has. There are also a number of factors that need to be considered from understanding your costs, setting your prices right, ensuring you can actually make enough profit on your goods / services once you’ve allowed for your costs, ensuring you understand and address tax, VAT, salary, bookeeping and accounting issues – and perhaps most essential to your survival; ensuring that you actually have the cash flow to survive as a business and personally. I certainly didn’t really know any of these things when I started and like many business owners have learned as I have developed in my business.

Mindful that these can be challenging issues I caught up with one of my fave contacts to discuss it. Heather Darnell is a business finance specialist with a background in corporate finance. She worked as a finance director and operations director – in the USA, Canada and the UK – before setting up her own business Back Office Support Solutions to help businesses with all things to do with money. I’ve known Heather for several years and she’s one of my colleagues at Zestworks. So I asked her to run through some of the key things to consider.

Heather is one of the experts and business owners featured in my new book Soul Trader – Putting the Heart Back into Your Business (pub 3 Oct 2012)

Part 1: Managing your money