Found Money with Steve Wilkinghoff

posted by David Wolf on Jul 29, 2009 | Comments (9) | Permalink | Trackback URL

Steve is a Chartered Accountant who has worked with hundreds of businesses over the
last 15 years. The vast majority of his career has been spent helping small business
owners understand and improve their business, and in the process improve their lives.
Steve’s vision, from the outset of his career, was to learn as much as he could about
different businesses so he could help their owners create businesses that served their
Dream Lifestyle—the only true measure of success for a business and its owner.
Steve realized that the vast majority of business owners (including many who owned
large and fairly sophisticated businesses) didn’t really understand their financial
information. Even business owners who could actually “read” a set of financial
statements didn’t truly understand their financial information, and what it was capable
of telling them.

They simply didn’t know the critical element in creating a successful business—how to
CREATE a certain financial result. At best, it seemed, a few business owners could
MEASURE historical financial results.
Steve discovered that most business owners simply did not know where their business
actually made money for them. And even worse, they didn’t “know how to know”.
There was simply no mechanism to take “traditional” accounting information and
transform it into something the business owner could use day-to-day in their business to
transform it.

So Steve started working hard to create that mechanism for business owners. And
when he delivered it the results were almost always amazing. One example is the client
who “found” over $10,000 in a one hour meeting with Steve. And that additional profit
was money that would continue to be realized year after year after year into the future.
Steve also started seeing that as soon as business owners “got” that connection they
wanted to talk about better marketing as the way to improve their profits.

Realizing a need, Steve started a concentrated study of marketing tactics, strategies, and methods,
and started working with clients to help them improve their marketing. Steve even
became a Certified Guerrilla Marketing Coach, a program endorsed by Jay Conrad
Levinson (probably the only accountant to also be a Guerrilla Marketing Coach).
Steve realized, though, that simply increasing and improving marketing efforts often still
resulted in a business that didn’t realize its total profit potential. And even worse, great
marketing targeted in the wrong areas could actually create a “business from hell”. One
where the owner was trapped working endless hours, not making enough money,
burning out, and always tight on cash flow.

So Steve wrote his first book,“Found Money-Simple Strategies for Uncovering the
Hidden Profit and Cash Flow in Your Business” to create yet another connection critical
for business owners. The book and its concepts empower business owners to
understand all the financial information already being created by their business, and
then use it to pinpoint where their business makes money, where it just “holds it own”,
and where it actually loses money.

Steve consults with business owners using the Found Money™ system modeled after
the tools and processes from his book. Steve also regularly presents at seminars and
speaks to groups of business owners to help them realize how and where their
businesses make money. He also delivers an online coaching program modeled after
the content of his current “Found Money” book.

FILED IN: Finance, Leadership, Management, Money Management, New Thinking, Operations, Purchasing, Productivity