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Make Your Numbers Makes Cents
Make Your Numbers Makes Cents episodes
- How to Research a Company's Financials Before You Start a BusinessWhether you're researching an industry before you start, sizing up a company you might invest in, or just want to understand the numbers where you work — financial analysis starts in the same place: knowing where to look. Say you're interested in the coffee business. You can learn a lot from a company that already does it well. Work for one. Be a customer and pay attention. And read the financials of the public players — every company that sells stock files a 10-K with the SEC, free to pull from sec.gov. It won't tell you everything; it's consolidated and high-level. But it shows you the industry's risks, its cost structures, and where the money comes from. This episode walks through where to find it all, using Starbucks as the example. And the bigger reason to learn any of this: you want to read the numbers yourself instead of taking anyone's word for it. If it's your own business, that's how you make sure the people you hire can't rob you blind.
Hosted by Julie Bonner. Bookkeeping and financial help for business owners — https://coeurbridge.com17 min - Introduction to Financial Analysis: How to Read a Company's Numbers (Start Here)You don't have to take a CEO's word for how a company is doing. You don't have to take your financial advisor's word either. The whole point of learning financial analysis is to read the numbers yourself and make up your own mind. This is the introduction — the map of what reading a company's financials actually involves. Start with what the company sells; if you can't understand that, it's a flag (ask Enron). Then look at the gap between when cash comes in and when revenue gets recognized. From there, it's the ratios: profitability (are they making money), liquidity (can they pay this month's bills), solvency (can they survive the long haul), cash flow (free cash flow especially), and the working-capital ratios that show how fast a business turns sales into actual cash. Each gets its own deeper dive later — this one is the lay of the land. Why bother? Pick your reason. As an investor, you can call buy/hold/sell on your own. As an employee, you can read the company you work for and feel it in your gut when it's time to leave before the layoffs. And if you ever want to buy or grow a business, this is how you spot the good ones. Pick a company you like — or work for, or want to start — and study it every quarter. The skill compounds.
Hosted by Julie Bonner. Bookkeeping and financial help for business owners — https://coeurbridge.com11 min - How to Read Financial Statements — The Secret to Financial IntelligenceFinancial statements look like a foreign language until someone shows you the trick: they're just your own money, scaled up. That's the whole on-ramp to financial intelligence. A profit-and-loss statement is a household budget — money coming in, the cost of running the place, what's left at the bottom. A company calls the leftover "net profit"; you call it discretionary income; same shape. A balance sheet is your personal net worth: what you own, what you owe, and the gap between them. For a company that gap is "equity," for you it's net worth, and it works exactly the same way — which is why the sheet always balances. The episode runs three quick gut-checks — $100,000 in assets against $30K, then $70K, then $150K in debt — and asks how each would feel if it were your life. That instinct is the point. Once you can read the numbers and decide how you feel about them, you can do it for your own business, an investment, or the company you work for — and make the call yourself instead of taking someone's word for it.
Hosted by Julie Bonner. Bookkeeping and financial help for business owners — https://coeurbridge.com12 min
About Make Your Numbers Makes Cents
From the publisher's feed
You had the business idea. You created the business. And somewhere along the way the money stopped making sense — leaking out where you can't see it, a profitable year that left nothing in the bank, a…
tax bill that came out of nowhere.
The numbers aren't the problem. They're the scoreboard, and the game was already played by the time you're reading them. What decides whether your business makes money — and whether it's worth anything the day you go to sell it — is the financial system underneath it. The one you were never taught to build.
Make Your Numbers Make Cents is about building that system on purpose. Every episode takes something that's quietly costing you — pricing, cash flow, a 1099 mess, a leak you didn't know was there — and traces it back to the decision underneath, so you fix the cause instead of mopping up the effect month after month.
No jargon. No lectures. No pretending this is harder than it is. Just the financial thinking the big players have always had — and the rest of us were left to figure out on our own.
Hosted by Julie Bonner. More at coeurbridge.com.
The numbers aren't the problem. They're the scoreboard, and the game was already played by the time you're reading them. What decides whether your business makes money — and whether it's worth anything the day you go to sell it — is the financial system underneath it. The one you were never taught to build.
Make Your Numbers Make Cents is about building that system on purpose. Every episode takes something that's quietly costing you — pricing, cash flow, a 1099 mess, a leak you didn't know was there — and traces it back to the decision underneath, so you fix the cause instead of mopping up the effect month after month.
No jargon. No lectures. No pretending this is harder than it is. Just the financial thinking the big players have always had — and the rest of us were left to figure out on our own.
Hosted by Julie Bonner. More at coeurbridge.com.