33:01
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
costs, projections, spending, people, net income, staffing, building, expenses, overhead, advertising, gross profit, wages, operating expenses, talk, warehousing, dollars, monthly basis, money, annual, year
SPEAKERS
Damon Pistulka, Andrew Cross
Andrew Cross 00:00
I’m wearing my clothes from yesterday. There you go
Damon Pistulka 00:20
all right, everyone. Welcome once again to the zero way round table. Oop, I’ve got the settings wrong here. Let’s get this right. All right. They probably had a wicked echo on, on LinkedIn there. So, everyone, thank you so much for being here today. We’re going to be talking today, as we said earlier in the week, and the last time we hear when we were talking about developing annual projections. We’ve been going over this for a few times now. Andrew Krause is joining us from from New York City today. He’s out there doing some business and going to be with us a little while. But Andrew, how are things today?
Andrew Cross 00:57
Calling in from midtown Manhattan? Yeah, yeah, they’re fine. Had a trip from hell yesterday, but still wearing my clothes from yesterday? Or the last two days? My bag? Oh, yeah. The good old types of getting back to traveling.
Damon Pistulka 01:12
Yep. Yep. So Andrea, Andrea lost his luggage, the airlines lost his luggage. And it took you What 22 hours to get to New York or something like that.
Andrew Cross 01:21
2020 hours from money, our city to New York.
Damon Pistulka 01:25
Nice. Nice. Well, today, you know, we’ve been talking about this for the last few few episodes of the Round Table, really, because we’re going through this with all of our clients at the end of the year. And we figured we would share, share with everyone here about building these annual projections and really getting getting your roadmap for 2022 completed and getting that done. So one of the things that we started out by going through the strategic planning, you know, what are we going to be doing next year? What are we going to be doing to increase sales?
How is that going to affect our sales, how’s it gonna affect staffing, how’s it going to affect other costs that we’ve got through the business and really working through those things. And, and then we went into last session is where we said, Okay, now, let’s start putting numbers to this, let’s take our historical numbers, and the changes that we see happening, and let’s build out of projection.
And so last time, we worked through sales all the way through our cost of goods down to the gross profit line on a profit and loss statement for our business. And, and got to that point, and had some good questions, good feedback from people. This time, we’re going to take it one step further to the end or the dinette income line. And we’re going to be developed, going from the gross profit down to the net income, we’re going to be talking about all those expenses that we have in these businesses, like our buildings, or people that this overhead staff, the advertising, all kinds of things down there as we go through those. So
Andrew Cross 03:06
if you’re looking at the opportunities, yeah, looking
Damon Pistulka 03:09
at the opportunities, right, because this is really the opportunity to run your business, you know, spend your money wisely.
Andrew Cross 03:16
Yeah, I mean, this is analysis. But this is what excites me about this is because there’s gold in those hills in their video, when you start to look at this stuff and look back and look forward. And yep, opportunities.
Damon Pistulka 03:30
Yeah. Yes. So we’ll start sharing the screen here on our on our PowerPoint, like last time, we’re going to flip between the PowerPoint and the actual, some of the models that we use. So I’m going to, I’m going to share, share my, my presentation screen. And All right, so we should be seeing that in just a moment. Good. There we go. Yeah. And all right. So again, talking about developing annual projections to the net income.
This is as simple as it gets. You know, last time, we all are want to know what our net income in a business is. I mean, we want to know what that is. And last time we took the total revenue minus the cost of goods sold. And now we’re going to be looking at the operating expenses, because what we want to know is the bottom line. That’s what everybody cares about. Right, Andrew?
Andrew Cross 04:31
Yep. Most everybody? Yeah.
Damon Pistulka 04:34
It’s just the way it is. So as Andrew was talking about, this is really your opportunity to figure out how you spend your money wisely because as we look at these businesses, we have so much sales, it’s gonna cost us so much to to deliver that product or that service. Then we have what’s left after that and that’s our that’s our gross Profit now, how are we going to spend that money that we have left after we produce the sales? To? Okay, he got it. Anders got it. So how are we going to to spend that money wisely? That gross profit wisely so that we can end up with with good net income?
Andrew Cross 05:22
And so too, you know, you have to also think about not spending money as well. Yes, identify areas where you’re supposed to be spending money. Yeah, not. And often that’s, that’s a sign about it. That’s
Damon Pistulka 05:37
for sure. That’s a good point, Andrew. So so we’re gonna walk through some of these steps and some of the considerations and each one of the bigger areas, everyone’s got different costs, but I think the methodology that will show well will adapt pretty well to just about any business. So, again, we’re looking at operating expenses. And we’re, we’re gonna understand where we’re spending money below the gross profit line, what we’re spending it on, what are the best places for us to spend it on?
So like I said, I was going to point it out in our model, we’ll be looking at total expenses. That’s what we’re looking at, we when you look at here, right above it, where it says gross profit. That’s what we were. That’s what we talked about last time, we talked about 18 million in sales, the $11 million in cost of goods and the fact that we had $6.7 million left over in gross profit. Now we’re going to look at how our total expenses of $4.68 million what they’re really consists of an A does it consist of the right things, because we, in this case, it’s showing that we have a $2 million net operating income.
Andrew Cross 06:54
But a point out, though, to think about, make sure you scrutinize and understand the difference between operating income expenses and non operating expenses. So we still have a lot of things out there. And you know, from a, from a buyer’s perspective, or from a deal perspective, we have to look at non operating expenses and take out, for example, interest or depreciation, or these are non operating expenses, yet they are expenses, maybe on a tax basis. But yeah, those are the kind of things so you really want to look at, you know, on this kind of stuff as your projections are strictly on your actual operating expenses.
Damon Pistulka 07:31
Yep. Yeah. And this kind of projection is the operating expenses. We don’t deal much with taxes in normally when we’re doing annual planning. That’s a great point, Andrew, we don’t worry about depreciation, amortization or taxes. I mean, they are what they are. It’s it’s we’re worried more about from an operational level what the business is going to be able to make?
Andrew Cross 07:50
Correct. It may impact cash flow, you know, yes. Thanks to but and you do have to look for them carefully. Because sometimes, you need to adjust this when you’re doing an operating budget. And you’ll see expenses in there that do need to be there. Yeah. Are there one time charges or an unusual expense? That doesn’t recur? Those are the kinds of things that yes,
Damon Pistulka 08:12
yeah. Yeah, that’s a great point, Andrew, because the profit and loss doesn’t project cash flow. It just projecting what would hit the profit and loss statement. And we could get into a long conversation about that. Maybe that’s something else in the future. But, you know, it doesn’t necessarily show what you’re paying in a loan to something else. It doesn’t show other things that that on a cash basis that you’re going to run into. So, but what we’re talking about today is the thing that make up your total expenses. All right. So again, where do we start? Boom, always, what do you do you look at this thing, and where do you start?
Andrew Cross 08:51
Unfortunately, I’ve got to jump off.
Damon Pistulka 08:53
Alright, Andrew, thanks so much. So I’m taking it from here. So glad, glad that Andrew could join.
Andrew Cross 09:02
You’re in good hands. All right.
Damon Pistulka 09:05
We’ll see about that. But thanks, everyone. If you got questions, go ahead and drop it in the chat. We’re gonna run through this, hopefully today to we’re gonna end up a little bit earlier than normal and want to come back to the tables arena and just talk with people for a while and do some do some networking there.
But again, where you’re going to start, you want to start with your history and changes like we said last time, you’re going to take your, your previous 12 months or get a 12 month, use your history through 1011 months, whatever you got, and then just put projections in for your, you know, guesstimates infer your last couple numbers. And then you’re going to include the changes like when we when we looked at this, we’re going to we’re going to include the changes, and when we start to talk about these things, and work through these history and changes and we start to work into these expenses.
We’re going to start with the biggest costs first when we look at this example like it’s really this is a simple example. The salaries in wages in the operating expenses is obviously the largest number, that’s where I would start, in our example that we’re going to go are going to switch over to in, in what we did, it just happens to be that staffing as well. But this is the easiest way I believe, to really go through your operating expenses is to start with the big numbers and work your way down. Because they’ll obviously affect your your projections the most.
When we look at these annual net income projections, like in our example that we’re gonna go over to, again, we’ve got things like advertising, we got auto expense, we’ve got building costs, we’ve got cost of money, we’ve got insurance costs, payroll expenses, professional services, travel, and in taxes, right. And these are typical things you’ll see there’s going to be other businesses are separated out differently. But this is what we have in our example. So when we look at the biggest costs, first, again, we’re going to look at payroll expenses are $3 million on this in this example, so that’s where we’re going to start, then we’re going to move to the building expenses, we’re gonna look at that.
And then we’re going to look at the advertising and others, because if we look at it out of the 4,000,007, that’s 3 million 4,000,002. So we’ve covered the vast majority of the dollars in those spins, if we can optimize those, we’re probably going to be doing the majority of the work by going through those categories first. Alright, so we’re going to talk about like we said, we’re going to talk about staff and overhead. And really what I, what I would recommend, and what we use with our clients is a staffing model. And that is just another tab in your annual projections.
You’ll see it in here, where it’s it is the listing of the people, annual salaries, and then are they working or not. And I when I say that you’ll, you’ll know what I mean, but that the staffing overhead is, again, it’s likely your biggest cost. And it’s something that you can easily adjust and move things around like you’re adding people and things and you’ll see that so as we go through the staffing overhead, we go back to our strategic planning, like we talked about before, this is what we did in our people section, we said, hey, we’re going to add a digital salesperson in q1, and q2, we’re not doing anything in our overhead in q3, Gao, we’re going to add some more people in here.
That’s what we were talking about an example. And we went through the strategic planning. And those are some of the changes again, we talked about history and changes. So we’ll look at that and go through those. But you need to understand where you’re at and what changes you’re going to make. And then we’re going to model them.
So just like last time, we’re going to go off road again. And we’re going to hit our model and talk about that. So I’m going to switch what I’m sharing here real quick. And we’re going to jump into our our multi year presentation or projections again. And as we go down through, I’m going to try to zoom in on I’m not going to try to I am going to zoom in. But like I said, we’re we’re starting. And if you can see this, we’re starting with the gross profit line here. And now we’re going to go down we’re going to work on in this case, the payroll expenses were down here.
When we look at it, the overhead payroll expenses section, and I’m going to make it bigger so we can see it. That’s what we’re working on. So we’re talking about now. And now, one of the things when you do this, there’s actual wages, which we have down here. Excuse me, I’m clicking on the wrong page. When you click here, we got wages. And then we’ve got payroll taxes. Now one of the things that you’re going to do to make this simple, I think is to on your taxes, taxes or taxes, right, you can just about figure that there’s going to be a percentage of your wages is going to be payroll taxes, figure what that out is in your state in your location. Just use a simple formula to calculate it.
It’s too it’s too too. Don’t get into the just rough it out that way. That’s the best thing if you got retirement, contribute contributions, do that same kind of stuff as well, in any other benefits, you know what healthcare is approximately for employees and those kinds of things. And then one of the other things that we talked about a lot, we’ll look at this too as an employee entertainment as we go through it. But this really starts out with I’ve got a wage details tab in this spreadsheet that we’ll look at.
So we Have our overhead wages. And this is something when you put these together, I, I personally like to do it like this. Because I have in here, we have positions, we have wages per month, I don’t really care about annual wages, and then I go, Okay, I have all my months here to the right. And what this allows me to do is it allows me to then, and then I have where it says number. So you can always adjust. If I don’t want this included in my if I’m going to say listen, I’m going to hire a CEO in in March, I can put this at zero.
The advantage of this, it allows you to really show realistically, what your financials should be based on the staffing changes you’re making. So this, this tab then updates, everything on your profit and loss. So as I do that, and I’m clicking on the wrong tab again, but when we go back to the profit and loss here, if our wages are not updating, right, you know that that should flow through update this and your annuals on the year and your annuals in those months. And let me go back here on this, I click Keep clicking the wrong one. But I’m going to show you what I mean.
See in these months, all the wages that are lower, right adjusted that, and then it goes up to 149,000. This is what makes this stuff easy. These are things that your your accounting people, you someone else can can get this stuff set up for you. But when you have these models set up like this with, with the staff behind it, and the ability to turn, you know, have have positions, you know, you’re either going to hire or that you’re they’re not going to be there anymore, somebody is retiring, whatever it is, and they tie into your profit and loss is where you get the really power in Excel and putting the these projections together.
So that was a little bit about that. So when you go through this in your in your staffing, I think as we talk with our clients, the numbers that end up here, really are just the result of what you planned over here. mean, what are you going to do in your overhead? What are you going to do in your finance department? Do I need to get? Do I need a DOI? Is it my year that I didn’t have a map separate? Now I have to have two people or you know separating it out? Because we’re getting busy enough?
Are we adding salespeople, you know, these are your overhead kind of things? Or do we have to have customer service? I mean, we’ve got a customer service manager or manager, we’ve got technical support person in here, I’ve got five service agents, customer service agents, but is it five? You know, do we go to seven after the first quarter because the growth I mean, you start to think about these things and go back and see what the effect is on your on your financial statements as you do this because the real key or not real key but benefit of doing this is looking what is the effect of me making these changes in staffing and anything else due to my net income.
I see so many business owners not really understanding that and taking a look at it. And this is one of the things that gives our clients and and people that do this incredible clarity in what that’s going to be because any of these changes that you’re doing in your overhead are usually what I call a step function change is a variable, like very role materials or something like that, that varies with if I do more my, it’s always going to be a certain percentage, it’s going to go up or go down with I’m selling more, right? This is not, if I had if I had another finance person, that just means I’m spending more money on that. And that directly reduces my net income.
So these things are really important to be able to go through and go back to your strategic planning and figure out by month, what you’re doing in that part of it to really drive into the net income. And as we were looking, the things that you consider in your payroll expenses, obviously our benefits entertainment and when we look at the entertainment, that’s one thing that even down to the point of you know, if you’re going to have a company Christmas party and you’re going to spend 10 $20,000, whatever on something like that, put it in there, allocate those kinds of things and and make sure it’s in there because it all makes a difference in the end when we’re doing this.
So any questions on payroll, anything like that or not payroll, but your staffing and ways that you can really model it out for the year that are simple. There are just go ahead and drop them in the chat. And we will certainly answer them, I guess make sure we got good there. All right, we’re going to go back into the presentation again, and talk a little bit more about the next part of this, which is moving down the list. As we look at these things, and we go back into this, get this going, right? You know, we looked at payroll expenses. And then now we got building costs.
And when you look at companies and fewer manufacturing company or your something to do with warehousing, your building costs can be view significant. And this, it’s, it’s not uncommon to have a million dollars or more in your building costs during manufacturing, when you consider all the things that go into it. So we’ve talked about the big one, which is staffing, and payroll and benefits, and all those kind of things. And a lot of times to your benefits roll up from all your direct labor into this section, too. So don’t Don’t forget about including that. And if you got to, if you got a benefits line up above, you’re okay. But if not, you need to make sure to include that in your payroll expenses.
But as we move into the building costs, we’re going to look at that, and take a deep dive into that. You know, when you’re in your facility costs, you got to consider a lot of things you got to consider upkeep you got to consider things like security you got, are you going to do any building build outs? Are you going to additions, improvements, those are all the kinds of things that you’re going to, you’re going to have to consider and what you’re going to do in your facility costs for the year, I mean, there’s some of it will be expensed and will go on the profit and loss statement like this.
And then there will be some that are not there more projects that are going to be financed or some other or balance sheet kind of things. But in your facility costs, there’s there are things that many people don’t consider well enough in there’s like if you’re using a warehousing facility, and you you’re spending 30 $40,000 A year repairing forklifts, because you got 20 forklifts running around in there, that’s not uncommon.
So make sure you’re including those kinds of things as you’re doing it. So I messed around with the off road pictures again, we’re going to run back into the into the model real quick here and run through some of the more common facilities costs. And I apologize for having to flip back and forth between these windows because I don’t think there’s a way for me to multi do this. But when we look here, and we’re going back in into the the model, again, like we said, we’re looking at the building costs.
Something and this is another thing that’s very common in in manufacturing or warehousing buildings is you may pay separate office rent warehouse rent in the same building. Some people do it, some people don’t, if you’ve got separate offices, where else obviously different. But when we look through this stuff, the these are the key, the three that you’re going to want, you want to include your rent, any repairs and maintenance, because most of the time, if you’re leasing, you’re going to have to include that in your costs. You’re not the landlord’s typically aren’t responsible for it. Security is another big one, that that people often underestimate.
And that’s getting to be bigger every time and I think some of the last clients we were looking at it was you know, two $3,000 a month. And, and they had to improve it because of the the areas he operate and other things. Another one that’s could be really big, you know, like if you’re in a molding company, this can be millions of dollars in a facility every year, just because the amount of electricity that you use, and it’s also an opportunity area that if you are spending those millions of dollars in electricity, there’s a lot of things that you should be doing your maintenance people should be doing working with the local power providers to reduce that.
We’ve been in places before with the high industrial areas where we’re like molding like I said, because it just uses so much energy that you can reduce that by 15 20% sometimes and and really do that and then if there’s any other miscellaneous costs, I’ve got a couple miscellaneous in here that I just stuck in to do that.
So it’s simple in your in your warehousing and when you look at this on a monthly basis, it’s the biggest thing to consider in your in your building is from looking at next year is get your increase because there’s usually a percentage increase so we look at our historical we got 3% increase, roll that in and make sure you’re budgeting for repairs and maintenance and security and utilities and and throwing in a little bit for the unknown. That’s the The the keys that I would really emphasize around the building costs when you’re doing that. And if, again, if there’s any questions as we’re going through this, please drop them in the in the comments there as we’re going along.
All right, well, that’s what the building expenses. And like I said, we wanted wanted to just briefly go through that part of it. And we’re going to go through one last piece of this. And then we’re going to spend a little time here on remote just talking. But we’re off road there. Now we’re going into one that I think many people, many people underestimate. And that’s advertising, this is what we have it in this case, but when we look into this, and if you’re selling things, or you’re selling products, or DTC or b2b, your advertising costs is something that, honestly, we really didn’t look at 25 years ago, we didn’t, it just wasn’t a part of the overall and now it has to be a part of the overall.
And we’re gonna, we’re going to look a bit more at that and look at how it is because when you look today, you know, we might have done television, radio and newspaper magazines before. But now we talk so much more about Internet and other types of media that we’re going to have to do in our advertising, let alone how much people are spending on on things like tech stacks and other stuff. And we’ll talk about that a little bit when we when we look at that part of it.
So we’re going to go off road one last time again, and run through that on our projection sheets. So when you look at the advertising, this is direct advertising, this is a second now this can easily be much more much less. In this case, this company spends 2.3% Total on advertising, that’s not a lot anymore. If you’re in a if you’re a direct to consumer brand, you could be spending a lot more if you look like a Red Bull or somebody like that, heck, they spend 15 20% of their overall revenue on things like this. But know what you’re doing. Right?
Know what you’re doing know what you’re getting for it. If you’re spending on PPC marketing, make sure you’re getting your money for it. Again, all this stuff is budgeted on a monthly basis. If you’re going to face things in and out, make sure you’re doing that and in your projections, and enroll in things like you want like in this case, our PPC is actually just set based on a 2% is what in this example we’re going with there. But when you look at this, there are so many costs in this part of it anymore.
When you look at things that we weren’t doing before it was it was company websites were made, and just kind of left set. Now, outsource marketing is very common. And spending 235 $10,000 A month it just depends on the company and what you need. And then when you look at other things like content development, and tell you how many companies never even thought 10 years ago about content development and are spending, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars of this year.
So when you look at your advertising and really put that together, work with your sales people, your marketing people and get those things in there. Right. And as trade shows come back into play to make sure you’re you’re understanding those costs and getting those things included in there. Right. So we’re really trying to get figure out again, how we’re spending our $6 million $6.7 million, we’ve got gross profit, how are we spending that efficiently and driving it to the to the net income line, you know, we talked about so we’ve got the advertising in this.
That’s $426,000 There’s auto expenses and stuff. I’m just going to run through them quite quickly. You know, we talked about building as a big one, you’re going to have the other things janitorial communication, continuing education, excuse me. janitorial computer tech supplies, that’s one that it hits a lot of people that they don’t budget nearly enough money replacement costs on computers and and the actual on the consequence of that the the amount that it costs people when you have too slow of computers, continuing education.
There’s a lot of companies that do that. This is where this stuff all gets put into the financial models to really give you to your net income. So that’s about what we were going to go through on here. I’m going to stop I’m going to go back to our presentation and wrap up there real quick. And we can jump back in here and answer questions and do those kinds of things.
So we’re off road there one last time. But this is this is where your rubber really hits the road. If you go through these steps in your expenses, go down through them, look at them on a monthly basis, like we talked about in the other step, we went through the down to the cost of goods line, it tells you how much on annual basis, you could expect, how much you should expect on a monthly basis from both, you’ve got these these gauges, you can say, Hey, we should have made a million dollars this month, we should have we should have net profit at $100,000.
This month, if we did, we didn’t great, or we need to look at where we were we’re not performing. And this is what it gives you looking forward into the next year. So that is the end. And we did finish a little bit early. So we’re going to have some time to talk here at the tables. I want to first of all, next time, what we’re going to be talking about is we’re going to take these annual projections and show you how you break these down into monthly. And then weekly goals. And this is where the power of your your annual projections really come into play is like, Listen, this is all fine and dandy, but how are we going to get there.
And that’s where giving people like your salespeople, the the goal of you’re going to have to bring you’re going to have to, you know, we’re going to have to have a million dollars in sales a week or whatever the right amount is. We’ll look at that next time and talk through those and then how do you structure meetings to make sure that this is being looked at and reviewed and the right people are talking about it on a monthly basis. So on a weekly basis to drive your the right month results. So I’m going to quit killing people with a PowerPoint presentation and stuff like that. We’re going to go back to the tables here on Remo and we are going to be back next year.
We’re not sure yet if we’re gonna come back on the six or six or the 13th. I think those are the two first two Thursday’s of the month. But we just want to thank everyone for being with us stopping by listening on LinkedIn reading the blog post on YouTube. And and just want everyone to have a wonderful holiday season however you’re going to celebrate it and look forward to what we can do in 2022. So I’m going to end the broadcast on LinkedIn live and then we’re going to turn over back to remote and we’re going to talk to the tables for a while there and move on about our day. Thanks so much. Alright, I’m gonna jump down to the table here and say hello
