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Should I Hire a Business Consultant for My Small Business?

Zenefits

At this point, the external consultant will combine their review of your business to industry benchmarks, as well as research competitor strategies. Or need to improve cash flow processes in your accounting department? During this period, a good consultant will also pinpoint business objectives. Evaluation . Reduced costs.

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What to Know About Small Business Liability Insurance

Zenefits

With tight cash flow and an uncertain market, small businesses can be financially ruined by a disastrous, unexpected lawsuit or accident. Insurance is often renewed annually, and coverage changes year-to-year depending on the market and insurance company benchmarks. And it’s more common than you think.

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Why Sit on All that Cash? Firms Uncertain on Cost of Capital

Harvard Business Review

Fully 79 percent of companies, including 91 percent with annual revenues greater than $1 billion, use discounted cash flow techniques. There is less consistency, however, in how organizations estimate cash flows and determine the weighted average cost of capital at which those cash flows are discounted.

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Still Many Ways to Skin a Capital Cost

Harvard Business Review

When executives evaluate a potential investment, whether it's to build a new plant, enter a new market, or acquire a company, they weigh its cost against the future cash flows they expect will spring from it. To make sure they're comparing apples to apples, they discount those future cash flows to arrive at their net present value.

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How To Really Measure a Company's Innovation Prowess

Harvard Business Review

One challenge today is that few companies have these numbers at their fingertips, and the lack of common definitions and publicly available statistics makes benchmarking difficult. It might even turn out that this framing highlights a few archetypical strategies that are more (or less) appropriate for different corporate circumstances.

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Three Headwinds for Facebook's IPO

Harvard Business Review

The business of augmenting sites like Kickstarter and Washington Post, while immensely important, likely isn't destined to yield enormous cash flows; since it's difficult to quantify on an external site Facebook exact benefit. For what it is — an uncertain bet — Facebook is going to be expensive.

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What High-Quality Revenue Looks Like

Harvard Business Review

Over time, a company's value becomes a function of both growth and cash flow. What is a benchmark for a good margin? The market has come to question whether its growth can be sustained, and with what underlying earnings. Focus on growth and growth alone is always a temporary strategy. Put another way, quality (i.e.

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