Benchmarking Your Financial Performance (Dallas)
Seminar Synopsis
Our reworked "Benchmarking Your Financial Performance" seminar is a must for principals who want to understand what metrics they need to pay attention to and how to impact those metrics to make their firms stronger. We are holding a 1-day intimate seminar in Dallas, TX to help you understand, track and act on your financial statements and benchmarks. If you are a principal or responsible for your firm's finances, consider joining us. Lunch is included.
Timing
Monday, May 22 9am-3:30pm, with optional networking afterwards
Location
Energy Square Building 1 in Dallas, TX
Energy Square Building 1
1st Floor
4925 Greenville Avenue
Dallas, Texas 75206
Price
$1,350 per attendee. Use "earlybenchmark" for $150 off by April 15.
Agenda (subject to change)
- 9:00: Introduction + Introductions
- 9:45: Crafting Industry-Standard Financial Statements
- 11:00: Measuring and Tracking the Benchmarks that Matter Most
- 12:45: Lunch (provided)
- 1:45: Funding Growth | Structuring Employee Compensation | Software Choices
- 3:00: Profit-Based Systems for Profit, Quality, Scalability, and Client Experience
- 3:30: Break
Accommodations
Not included, but suggested booking at Drey Hotel or The Highland.
Detail
First, we will walk through how to craft industry-standard financial statements so that we are working with the same set of numbers and definitions. Next, we will dive into Performance Benchmarking, including the following elements:
- Monthly Overhead.
- Cash Cushion appropriate for your client base.
- Ratio of Obligations to Assets.
- Client Concentration and Client Distribution: minimum size, maximum size, and optimum size.
- Number of Qualified Clients on your roster.
- Ideal Yearly Client Spend.
- Ideal Facility Size for your employee load, including minimum and maximum optimized space.
- Ideal Facility Expense (Burdened) for your employee load, including minimum and maximum allowance.
- Net Profit: actual and expected.
- Unburdened Compensation Allowance for employees.
- Accounts Receivable Outstanding measured in turnover days.
- Utilization/Realization, measuring your financial opportunity vs. your financial output.
- Fee Billings Per FTE, with an expected range for your specific type/size of firm.
After leading with this benchmarking data and a clear explanation of how to apply it to your situation, we’ll also cover some important aspects of agency management.
We’ll examine how to manage and fund growth. How much growth is safe? What are the signs that growth is out of control? How do you tame it? How do you prioritize growth decisions? Where does the money come from? How far out should the troops be from the supply lines?
We’ll look at employee compensation, benefits, and incentives. Without critical guidance from you folks, managers lack the guidelines that help them make smart decisions in the short-term that won’t cripple the firm in the long-term.
We’ll evaluate the best software solutions to run your firm, from accounting to project management to timekeeping.
And finally, we’ll focus on the processes that every firm can adapt to preserve their commitment to quality, profit, scalability, and a favorable client experience.
This has typically been our most attended seminar, and I’m looking forward to offering it in revised form after a long hiatus.
Is this a fit for me? That’s the question I’d ask in your shoes, so let me take a stab at giving you a candid answer. Most everyone here will be a partner/principal or the firm’s accountant. Either way, you’ll get the most benefit if two things are true.
- First, you have access to the firm’s financial data.
- Second, you are in a position to impact the firm’s performance, either directly (by making changes) or indirectly (by making recommendations to someone who can).
There will be no forced disclosure of your firm’s financial performance, but it will be useful if you can run the calculations on your own numbers. We’ll illustrate how to calculate them and then guide you in doing it for yourself.
If you don’t have those numbers with you, you can do them on the sample financial statements that we’ll provide. As with all of our seminars, there will be an open environment of helpful sharing, but that’s certainly voluntary on your part.
We’ve priced this one-day seminar so that a principal and the accountant can come together (it’s the least expensive event we do). Depending on where you live, you could easily fly in the night before and leave the same day of the seminar, minimizing your time away from the office.
