Doing Business – The Right Way (Part 9)

This is the ninth in a series of articles that will hopefully educate readers and illuminate the process of doing business in a simple to understand, nuts-and-bolts way.

To read all the articles in this series, click on any of the following:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8

In past articles we have developed a planning tool that will now allow us to look into the future and create a scenario for the business that can be tracked and follow.

The Financial Plan as a crystal ball…

In Part 8 of this series, we developed a financial picture of the company’s past performance.  It looks like this:

If you refer to Part 8, you will see the formulae for each of the rows above and how the numbers were developed.  Now we can actually begin to plan!

Are you planning to add equipment at some point in the coming year?  Plug in that purchase in the correct month umder G&A.  Adding a person or two down the road?  Add the monthly costs in COGS Labor or Administrative labor in the months where that additional cost will occur.  Thinking about adding a product or service?  Add the additional anticipates sales to Sales in those months where they are appropriate and the additional COGS as well.

All these questions and more can be plugged into the base model and you can see what happens to Gross Profits and Net Profits.  Using Excel or a similar spreadsheet program is a very useful tool to use, since you can keep the original base map of the business and make a copy to use as a “what if” planning tool, seeing how changes affect your business model instantly.

When you work with this tool, you need to be looking at your Business Plan as well.  Your Business Plan (that you should be updating every year) needs to reflect what you are planning to do as a strategy, and the Financial Plan you are manipulating using this tool is how you intend to get there by the numbers and not guesswork.

Overhead… Headache or a simple calculation?

One of the most common questions clients have asked me is “How do I figure overhead in my pricing?”  It’s a good question, because buried in that question is the realization that there is this big chunk of money that affects the business and has to be accounted for, but it is apparently confusing as to how to account for it properly.  Most small companies deal with this question through some sort of hit-or-miss addition to the direct costs of a product or service, hoping that they end up with something left over they call “profit.”

Well, that may work, but it is guesswork and supposition, and if there is one thing I try to teach is that guesswork, supposition, and “feel” will eventually get you into trouble.  Let’s look at Overhead (G&A Expenses) and develop a numbers-based approach to deal with it properly.

Markup – Not getting what you think you are getting

Most small and medium sized businesses use “markup” as a way to deal with Overhead.  If something costs $5 to make, they “mark it up” 100% and sell it for $10.  If a service crew goes out and installes an HVAC unit, and the total costs are $5,000 including equipment, travel, materials and labor, the markup may be 30%, making the price to the customer $5,000 x 1.3 = $6,500.  Makes perfect sense.  However, what is really happening?

That 100% markup on a $5 item only yields a 50% “profit.” 

That 30% markup on $5,000 only yields a “profit” margin of 23%! 

How did THAT happen?  Where did the rest of it go? Easy…. divide the actual sales dollars by the actual dollars remaining after markup to see what the “real” margins are when you use markup.

5 / 10 = .5 or 50%

1500 / 6500 = .23 or 23%

The point is, markup can be misleading and never yields what you might think it does.  There is a better way…

Calculating the cost of overhead…

One of the main reasons I went through great pains to develop the base business model and the financial plan is to get real numbers for COGS and G&A.  Those numbers are critical to help us price your product or service, and wil allow you to further analyze your business and business model.

Let’s see how to calulate the effect of overhead on costs the right way.

It’s actually quite simple…  Divide your G&A dollars for the year in your Financial Plan by your COGS dollars in the Financial Plan for the year.  You will get a ratio or a percentage.  Using the example plan above, you get:

$108,540 (G&A) / $134,045 (COGS) = 0.81 or 81%

Ok, you may ask, but what does that mean?  It means that G&A is 81% of the size of COGS.

Ok, you may further ask, why do I care?

Good question!  Think about this:  If I know the actual cost of producing something – labor costs, materials, supplies, shipping, packaing, etc. – I have a real number in dollars, right?  Let’s say that number is $100.  If I know that G&A or Overhead costs are 81% of the value of COGS, can’t I just add $81 to that $100 and come up with an overall REAL cost of $181 ($100 x 1.81)?  Hmmm…. can’t I do that with ANYTHING if I know the real costs and the overhead ratio? The answer is, absolutely!

Pricing made simple… or is it?

Now that we can get decent numbers for COGS and a calculated G&A cost, we can just add something for profit, and we have a price!  Well, yes and no.  Let’s look at it a little more closely…

If we have COGS at $100 and the overhead ratio is 81%, our costs for the item are $181.  If we simply do a markup, we are back in the same boat as before.  We are a little better off in the sense that we have a good number to plug in for Overhead, but the problems with simple markups is still the same.  As you may suspect, there is a better way.  I call it Planned Profit Margin.

What is Planned Profit Margin?  As the name suggests, what we are trying to get to is a real profit margin that is planned rather than accidental through markup.  Let’s say we want a reasonable 15% net profit on that item.

In marking up an item that costs $181, we add 15% of the costs to get a price. So, we get:

$181 x .15 = $27.15 + 181 = $208.15

A 15% profit, right? No… 27.15 / 208.15 = .13 or 13%

We slipped 2% there, didn’t we?  It may not seem like much, but 2% of sales over time can be a lot of money.  Let’s do it the right way…

The right formula to use is this:

$181 / (1-.15) = $181 / .85 = $212.94  (The true costs divided by the reciprocal of the margin we want.)

What we have done is to establish a REAL 15% Net profit on an item that cost us $100 in COGS, accounted for Overhead, and calculated a true 15% Net Margin.  If we do this same thing for each and every item or service we sell throughout the year, what should we see at the end of the year?  We should meet the Planned Profit Margin of 15% Net that should be in our Business Plan and our Financial Plan.

Now that we have the tools necessary to analyze and price things, next time we will look at the tactics needed to accomplish your goals.

———-

Please contact me offline at microconsulting@aol.com with anycomments, suggestions or ideas for future articles that you may not want to share here.

———-

Related articles

• Profit Margin vs. Markup (markwinstein.com)
• How to set retail prices and markups (smallbizsurvival.com)
• How to Calculate Manufacturing Overhead (brighthub.com)
• How to Calculate Gross Profit Margin (brighthub.com)
• 7 Tips for Reducing Your Overhead Costs (lifehack.org)
• Ten Questions to Ensure a Viable Business Model (startupprofessionals.com)
• What Is Financial Planning? (brainz.org)
• Basic Sample of a Business Model Template (brighthub.com)
• The Top 10 Things You Need to Know About Business Models: An Analysis of Keeping The Main Thing The Main Thing (bizcovering.com)
• Four Key Elements in an Abbreviated Business Plan (blogs.sitepoint.com)
• Tips for Executing New Business (howtospoter.com)
• Writing the Executive Summary of the Business Plan (imbrandon.com)
• Business Plan Outline (imbrandon.com)
• What goes into a business plan? (e27.sg)
• What Goes Into A Business Plan: Outlining Your Goals vs. Crunching Numbers? (entrepreneurs-journey.com)