Money. This is the absolute dumbest. One of my first businesses. Basically, we didn't keep any books for four years, and basically ran the whole business of how much bank balance sweet we got answered. Yeah, I'm not gonna be paying and sit down in a few weeks time. I mean, we did pretty well, we made almost $2 million in sales in our in our first year and that level for a number of years off and then we hit the financial crisis in 2007.

So we weren't doing a lot of things wrong. We just had no control over over the cash. And then in 2009, for 2010, it all went terribly wrong because we got no real way of managing cash or understanding how much was going out. And some of the money we realized that we were spending 50 60,000 quid a month. No idea where it was going or how it was going. And that was a huge disaster.

And it almost meant that they that the company died. In fact, he got so bad because we hadn't managed the finances correctly that I think also just before Christmas 2010 we had the choice of, Okay, do we buy some milk for the baby? Or do we buy some rice so that we can have something to eat over over Christmas? Oh, so, that is obviously not a good place to to be in. I mean, it was caused by so lots of other factors. And if the marketer kept on growing, would it be fine for another few years, but eventually something would have happened that would have absolutely screwed us over.

Just Just that did. So. There are a number of ways of doing it. When you're an entrepreneur, most of the time in order an accountant, you don't have time to be doing the bookkeeping or to be getting everything sorted out, yeah, your time can be best spent somewhere else. But a lot of people say, I want to spend 100 quid a month on an accountant because I've got so little cash. The reality is that one, have somebody preparing the books.

So let's say this is how much you're spending this month each month. And this is when you're going to run out of money. There, there, you've got it in black and white, you don't have to think about it, it's clear, you don't worry so much, because it's clear it's on the paper in front of you. And if it's on the paper in front of you, you can do something about if nothing else to talk to the accountants like what can I do? Because I'm in a hole I can see it's going down. And the accountant can very quickly say, this is how much runway these happens, how many days you've got left to be able to break even.

So that is really, really important. The other things that the accountant or the bookkeeper can do is say give you a budget and say You sit down with the accountant and say, this is how I'm going to be spending this amount of money this month. And then at the end of the month, you sit down with the accountants said, okay, you spent this in this way and why is that all over the place. And as as entrepreneurs, it's really good to be held accountable like that because fundamentally in a big corporation, nobody can go out and spend money however they want. That is part of the reason why they they tend to hang around and slowly get a little bit bigger every every year. As an as a as an entrepreneur.

You can do whatever you want. And if you say I'm going to buy this nice Porsche, with my wife thought I was going to do once when we had a really big sale and he's like, I could have done it that night was bad idea. We could have done that. But that is not good for you to be able to make decisions or when totally out of control except by the limitations that you Put on yourself. So by sitting down with an accountant and say, This is my budget, this is what I'm going to be spending for the next three to six months. And then at the end of the month having to sit down with the accountants or if you're large enough, the the chief financial officer or however you do it, and say, I spent this because of this, I spent this because of this, I spent this because of this.

It brings a lot more sort of financial control into the business. Because one of the is really important when you have to justify yourself to somebody else. You make far fewer stupid decisions. As much as anything and being an entrepreneur is avoiding stupid decisions. If somebody say, why do you need to be working in a co working office? Why can't you have the team in your living room and saving two and a half thousand quid a month?

Yeah. Why do you need to have the the Christmas event strip club that will save you $3,000 and make the female members of staff a lot lot more comfortable. Yeah, if somebody is not asking you, these questions, you very quickly can go the wrong thing. And as an entrepreneur, you don't always have the mental bandwidth or come back to this again. And again, you don't have the mental bandwidth to always be analyzing every decision you can afford today, you've just got to go forward quickly. But when you have to justify your decisions, you then just scrap the whole project crap decisions, because you know how to do it.

So this is one of the best one of the fastest, one of the cheapest ways of saving vast amounts of money. And that is getting an accountant and I hate them, getting an accountant to hold you to a camp and to tell you where you are each month because it stops you going into the red like I did, and that would have sold stop me having so much pain and agony and I've got a white bed and that's one of the reasons why in my personal life, so Get your finances in order. Get somebody to tell you how bad or how good your finances are, and that will save you lots of grief and mean that you sleep better every single night.