Seth Godin: Money is a story and money flows

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Akimbo Podcast, 3. April 2019

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Meine NOtizen

In diesem Podcast geht es um Cashflow.

„Cash flow is an amorphous concept that really needs to be understood by anybody who buys or sells, who starts something, who borrows money, who saves money or who interacts with money.“

1. Dank Jahrhunderten von Kapitalismus hat alles in unserem Leben mit Geld zu tun. „Money is everywhere.“
   • ABER, „it’s a giant BUT: The relationship between money and your worth, your value, your contribution is muddy at best. People who make more money aren’t better, aren’t even better at the thing that they do necessarily than people who don’t. People who sell their music aren’t necessarily better musicians than the people who don’t. And we live in a culture where those two things have been conflated.“
   • „If you set out to make money and you don’t make money, then you didn’t do a good job of making money. But if you set out to make a difference, if you set out to change people, whether or not money comes in isn’t really the point of what you set out to do.“
2. „Money flows. Money is always moving. Even that money in your mattress. Because everyday it’s worth less than it was worth when you put it there.“
   • „When you put money in the right place, it grows, and when you put it in the wrong place, it decreases in value.“  

Welche Aspekte des Cash Flows spricht Seth Godin an?

1. Cash-to-cash Cycle: Handelsunternehmen zahlen ihre Lieferanten viel später, als sie das Geld von ihren Kunden bekommen. Hier läuft der Cash Flow in die falsche Richtung (aus Sicht des Lieferanten).
   • Seine Regel: Positive cash flow is a good idea. Organize your work to get paid sooner and to pay slower. Not by ripping people off, but by the way you organize your work. Find customers who need what you do enough so they pay in advance.
   • Beispiel: Airlines
   • „So when we think about, How do we approach the market place?, we can begin by understanding that some people have a problem that’s significant enough that they will pay us in advance to solve it. But that means picking the right people and solving the right problem.“
2. Margins: Bei der Preiskalkulation müssen alle anderen Kosten berücksichtigt werden:
   • Das hat nichts mit gieriger Profitorientierung zu tun.
   • „That margin says: I need to count what it really costs me to be here on the day you need me, with the story you need to be here, with the support and the insurance and the people and the overhead. And not only that! I need to pay my bills on the days you didn’t show up.“
   • The vast majority of small businesses fails for one of two reasons: Not enough business or not charging enough for what they do.
   • Mehr Kunden (= more business) ist ziemlich unwahrscheinlich und sehr optimistisch. 
   • Die Alternative: Nicht viele Kunden, sondern die Kunden, die mich dringend genug brauchen, dass sie mich im Voraus bezahlen. 
3. Your inventory isn’t free.
   • Alles, was ich „in der Schublade“ habe… „it cost you something to put it there. And every day it’s there, you’re paying for it.“
   • „You’re paying for it because you could have gotten rid of it and gotten cash for it, but instead you’re holding on to it.“
   • Vgl. die Opportunitätskosten jedes einzelnen Tages, an dem B41 noch nicht veröffentlicht ist…
   • Wir können uns durchaus ein Beispiel an der Bekleidungsindustrie nehmen: „Clear it out, take the cash and use the cash to invest in the next thing.“
4. BCG Matrix
   • SG nennt die Question Marks „problem children“. 
   • Die Cash Cows müssen die täglichen Rechnungen zahlen PLUS genügend Geld abwerfen, um in die „problem children“ investieren zu können, damit sie sich richtig entwickeln können.
   • Und: „Don’t blow it with your Stars.“ Und wenn du einen Star hat, „good on you!“
5. Debt
   • „It’s easier than ever to borrow money.“
   • When should you borrow money: „When it goes up in value.“ 
   • Alles, was mit der Zeit an Wert verliert… dafür sollte man keine Schulden machen. Beispiel: Auto kaufen.
   • „So what we have is the opportunity to bring our discipline to the table and say: There are things I would like to buy so I will save to buy them.“

„Either money’s managing you, or you are managing money.“ 

„Underlying most of this analysis is the idea that your personal cash flow, your organizational cash flow is largely up to you from the start. If you decide to spend the first few years sleeping on the floor, eating black beans and rice, cutting your overhead to the bone, not borrowing at the beginning… it ends up giving you positive cash flow. That positive cash flow gives you the freedom to invest in things that are going to go up in value, to dig deep, to create projects where you have positive cash flow. And if you can have positive cash flow at the beginning and avoid the temptation of debt when you’re not sure what assets to invest in, you will find new opportunities. And then, when the right opportunity comes, it may make perfect sense for you to invest in it and get debt to invest in it, because you are confident that it will pay off many times more than it’s going to cost you.“

• vgl. The Bootstrapper’s Bible

„All the things I talked about are strategies around the game of money. Money is always moving. Money grows. Money costs. Cash flow matters. But it’s a game, it’s not personal. And what we need to do as productive artists and professionals who create things is to say: When money is involved, we have to put our game hat on. That this isn’t a personal referendum on who I am and what I am worth. It’s a game, and I can play it to make more money, or I can play it poorly. But as soon as we conflate it with ‚Who am I as a human? What do I count for? What am I worth?‘… then we’re gonna lose that game. Because the forces that are around us are raid to take advantage of someone who’s doing it personally, who’s checking the balance on some screen as a way to determine their self-worth.“ 

„We each have the opportunity to create something that matters, to do work that matters for people who care. But we can’t do it if we’re stressed out of our minds about money.“

„If we’re smart […] we can use cash to our advantage, not have it used against us.“ 

Ergänzung aus einer der Fragen aus der darauffolgenden Podcast-Folge:

• Sich lange Zahlungsziele (als Lieferant) leisten zu können, ist eine der größten Wettbewerbsvorteile. Weil derjenige, der sich 60 Tage Zahlungsziel leisten kann, bekommt den Auftrag gegenüber dem, der nur 30 Tage verkraftet. Dieser Wettbewerbsvorteil lässt sich natürlich auch bewusst und strategisch am Markt einsetzen. 
• Überhaupt gilt: Cash nicht unbedingt (sofort) zu brauchen, eröffnet viele Möglichkeiten.
• Andere Strategie: Ein unverzichtbarer Lieferant werden. Einer, für den es keinen Ersatz gibt. Diese Lieferanten werden auch pünktlich bezahlt aus Angst, sie sonst zu verlieren.
• Noch eine andere Strategie: Die langen Zahlungsziele in den Preis reinkalkulieren. Du willst mich erst in 60 Tagen bezahlen? Okay, aber das wird dich was kosten!