MEDICAL ACUMEN IS THE FOUNDATION
OF A PRACTICE;
FINANCIAL STRATEGY IS THE DETERMINANT
OF ITS SUCCESS
Money is an instrument, and like any tool when used effectively, helps produce more and increase capability – in this case, build your future. It’s important to understand what money means to you, and how it serves as a means to an end.
Creating discretionary income, money after taxes and necessary expenses, is as critical as managing any business expenditure. Yet, quite often it is unrecognized for its potential to substantially generate greater income if effectively allocated. Frequently the margin of cash flow is relegated to an afterthought rather than a profitable first initiative toward funding yourself.
Every business exists to make money to create economic prosperity as well as provide value. And in the quest for profitability, efficiencies in managing operational costs and expenditures combined with effective valuation of products and services serve as the underpinnings of that economic success. But how money is utilized as discretionary income strategically, can be equal in value to these measures, if not a more exponential multiplier to generating income and increasing resources.
A financial strategy is a highly-effective and efficient use of money as a means, or opportunity, to support the major goals that you want to have happen. Understanding what you want in your life frames every financial decision and its alignment with your values.
Just as a clinical DVM performs a diagnostic process on an animal patient to uncover facts, support a diagnosis, and prescribe treatment, financial diagnostic evaluation is very much the same. In business and finance, the patient is you, your family, and practice, considered holistically. Through diagnostic analysis a financial strategy can be identified along with the drivers to move forward substantial results.
| Medical Diagnostic Process | Financial Diagnostic Process |
|---|---|
| Complete a comprehensive patient history to understand health, existing conditions, and their impacts | Complete a detailed financial/business history to understand current conditions, extenuating circumstances, and resources, and their effects |
| Do a thorough physical evaluation of all twelve body systems to determine status and function | Perform a detailed financial/business evaluation of all systems and documents to discover effectiveness/inefficiencies |
| Conduct Diagnostic Analysis with tools such as x-rays, clinical labs (blood, urine, or tissue) and microscopic evaluation to analyze facts that lead to a diagnosis | Conduct a Diagnostic Gap Analysis to analyze strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that affect financial health, and align this with required time horizons |
| Provide a diagnosis and prescribe a treatment or protocol to restore optimum health | Construct a financial strategy with check points tied to a calendar to evaluate effective results |
The first step in architecting your future is identifying major goals, which require leveraging money as a means for accomplishment. Defining goals guides every financial decision in a strategy and lays the groundwork to funding moving forward.
Besides asking what you want, consider where you envision being 20 or 30 years from now. While life changes continuously and is difficult to predict, having an idea of what kind of journey you want in life, offers a foreseeable destiny to map out.
A diagnostic review looks at all financial conditions to determine revenue top performers as well as areas that hold you back, including obstacles that damage revenue generation. This insight provides a basis for allocating discretionary income or cash flow over a timeline to drive results.
Funding strategy brings into focus the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that are relative to creating economic resources for future income generation.
Funding begins with an understanding of your starting point: realizing your assets and liabilities, and what items on your personal and professional balance sheet produce cash flow or take away from it. The point of evaluation is to comprehend what actions work in your favor, and what decisions create financial mistakes that reduce income or put you in a position of liability. This process creates discretionary income allocations that you can use to develop your own wealth.
Part of successful funding strategy is using budgeting as a tool to track and build awareness of money’s utilization. The process of creating awareness will inform you how aligned spending and saving is with your goals. The clarity provided by budgeting offers how to change actions to produce greater cash flow and see what reasonable measures in savings produce results.
To build a solid funding strategy, ask yourself:
ARCHITECTURE FOR FINANCIAL SUCCESS is a customized model for producing the best financial outcomes. Much like any building process, this requires a blueprint, or comprehensive financial strategy to define the constructs for how resources are best utilized in your personal and professional finances to produce the greatest monetary results.
Whereas a funding strategy prioritizes allocations and benchmarks, a financial strategy for the architecture of money utilization is built around information, and its ability to orchestrate and coordinate financial products and services (such as stocks, bonds, cash value insurance, and savings) to work succinctly together to exponentially grow income.
An effective financial architecture takes into consideration what may cause economic loss, such as disability, poor health or death, loss of a partner or general liability of your practice and adverts/minimizes these scenarios proactively. Risk management addresses levels of acceptable risk and protections, such as life, disability or liability insurance.
Investment strategies can guide successful investing with the development of a diversified portfolio and a plan to balance investment across levels of risk and income generation (i.e. exchange traded funds with hundreds of stocks versus a handful of stocks, or compared to bonds, less risk, but also less return). Even debt repayment and structuring can be an investment as most debt is a very expensive use of money and can cost more in the long run.
The blueprint for financial architecture anticipates a comprehensive picture of income preservation through tax strategies, estate and business buy-outs, and retirement plan accounts, all which can reduce liabilities.
Discover an Entrepreneurial Approach to Income Generation... |
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Terry Hall, Entrepreneur DVM’s Financial Strategist & Architect, provides qualified, unbiased analysis of your assets and liabilities, cash flow, insurance coverage, investments and tax strategies, to set-up the steps to obtain proficiency in your desired results.
