What Are You Actually Keeping?

Confront · Chapter 1

Set four numbers from memory

Do not look anything up. Do not judge yourself for getting it wrong. Just answer the way you would answer a friend who asked.

Money that came in last year $800,000

Everything, before anything went back out.

$250K$5M

What you think you keep 10%

Out of every dollar that came in. The number in your head, not the one your tax preparer gave you last spring.

0%35%

Charges you have not looked at in a year $400 a month

Software, vendors, services that renew on their own. Twelve dollars here. Forty-nine there.

$0$4,000

Invoices you will never collect $15,000

Ninety days and older. The ones you wrote off in your head but never took off the books.

$0$150K

Locate · Chapter 2

See the gap

The distance between how your business looks and what it actually produces. This is where that gap becomes a number.

It looks like you keep

$80,000

You actually keep

$60,200

Your starting performance gap

$19,800

Around a quarter of the profit you thought you had.

Clarity replaces chaos. Nothing is beyond repair.

Left alone, that is $59,400 over three years.

Yes, you guessed. Guessing is the point. To find out what the number really is, pull twelve months of your bank statements, sort by amount, and go line by line. That is the Bank Sweep in Chapter 2.

The Missing Middle · Introduction

Find where the rest is hiding

What you just worked out is your starting point, not the total.

No eyes in the middle

The larger part sits where no slider can reach

Someone posts your transactions. A CPA files your return. Both are doing the job they were hired to do. Nobody with financial knowledge is giving advice in between, and that gap is where things get missed.

$20,000

Tax savings surfaced for an owner who already had a bookkeeper.

$51,000

A sales tax overpayment recovered for a restaurant that had a bookkeeper and a CPA.

$18,000

Unused FICA tip credits in that same business, in records everyone had been through.

Same data their existing people already had. Different work.

CLARITY is the seven step framework in the book. Confront, Locate, Assess, Remove, Implement, Take Control, Yield. Answer a short questionnaire and I will send your CLARITY Business Implementation Plan within forty-eight hours: where you stand on all seven steps, what is costing you most right now, and what to do first.

Get your CLARITY Plan

Clarity replaces chaos. Nothing is beyond repair.
Jacqueline A. Oberst MS Data Analytics · Certified Exit Planning Advisor · CEO and Founder, Sunderland Valley Enterprises