Entries by Matt Garrett

Data-driven Fundraising Ideas for Nonprofit Organizations

TGG recently hosted a roundtable on nonprofit fundraising. We invited our clients and other nonprofits in the community to discuss strategies for increasing donations, expanding their donor base, and appealing to millennial donors.

The forum was moderated by Steve Goldstein, a Consulting CFO with TGG. Steve not only serves some of our not-for-profit clientele, but also founded and runs his own non-profit, Starfish Asset Fund, which provides low interest loans and financial education for transitioning foster youth.

We’ve compiled some of the takeaways from the roundtable because we believe these insights apply to a broad range of not-for-profit organizations.

The agenda covered many aspects of marketing, with an emphasis on using technology and data to improve results.

There were many great discussions and actionable items that can be applied by any nonprofit organization intent on realizing their mission. We have summarized a number of the top takeaways:

Cash vs Accrual Accounting

Cash accounting and accrual accounting are two concepts that are foreign to most people, but it’s important to understand the difference. As a business owner, if you manage your books on a cash basis, you will ultimately fool yourself. Why is this?

The Easiest Sale: Upselling Tips

What’s the easiest sale that you can make as a business? The easiest sale you can make is to a happy customer, and you can sell them something else. Here are a couple upselling tips:

First, you can sell your customers a new product or service. This is actually the hardest of these three different upsells to make, because you have to create or stock a new product, or provide a new service.
Next, you can sell your customers more of what you’re already selling them. It’s the same product or service, but more of it. This expands the relationship.
Third, you can do something that is often the easiest to do, but people are the most fearful to try. You can increase your prices.

How Increasing Utilization Affects Profitability

We’re going to talk about increasing gross margin. One of the best ways that you as a business owner can go about figuring out how to improve profitability without increasing sales. One of the best ways to improve gross margin is by increasing throughput or increasing utilization.

It’s easiest to talk about in terms of the manufacturing sector. Products get created in a manufacturing building. They go in on one side, and come out as finished goods. If products are being manufactured at a 100% efficiency rating, that means that we’re going as fast as we possibly can. But nearly no one is going as fast as they possibly can. If a realistic efficiency rating is more like 80%, what would happen if we increased it by just 10%? What if we could go from 80% to 90% efficiency?

How Discounting Affects Profitability

When we’re thinking about cash, we have to think about the discounts that we might be offering, and how discounting affects profitability. Clearly, we want to try to take discounts if we get them. But what about discounts that we’re offering, sales or incentive discounts for people to either buy more, do different things with our products, or buy them at certain times? What about sales discounts? What is that doing to the cash and profitability of our business?

5 Sales Planning Steps to Profitability

True sales planning is one of the most important things that a business can do each year. It forces business leaders to think through – in significant detail – what is necessary to accomplish their business goals.

Sales planning  is more than a tactical plan set from on high: “Your quota is $1MM, now go sell!”

Instead, it’s about planning to sell profitably.

Selling profitably is something that is not as straightforward as it seems. We see examples all the time, in companies big and small, that believe they are selling profitably and selling well–but simply are not.

There are examples of strategic decisions to sell certain products or services at lower margins or even at a loss. These may include gaining traction in a new market, gaining a marquee client in a new industry, or an initial sale with high likelihood of highly profitable add-on services.

But these examples should be few and far between and only done based on a specific plan, not because you didn’t realize it was an unprofitable sale.

Importance of Sales Forecasting

The single most important element in the forecasting process is the Sales Forecast.  Generally, Sales drives everything else; it is what determines the expense spending plan.  If the company is a manufacturing company, the sales forecast will drive the production plan.

There are several different ways to approach Sales Forecasting.  Typically it starts with the Sales Department figuring out how much product they can sell in the following year.  Sales people are naturally optimistic by nature, usually overestimating achievable sales.  There are several factors that can impact the forecast:

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