The Financial Management Control Center

The Newest Innovation from Lodestar Consulting…

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Opening Your Cockpit

Launching Your Spreadsheets

Learning Where You Have Been

Learning Where You Are Now

Seeing Where You Are Going

Protecting Your Security

System Requirements

How to Order

The Money Back Guarantee

 

 

Modern aircraft are complex and incredible machines, much like your HVAC business! And to make it easier to fly these marvels, more and more manufacturers are installing state-of-the-art avionics in these airplanes, making it easier and easier for the pilot to control the plane and fulfill its mission safely and effectively.

Think of Lodestar’s new Financial Management Control Center as avionics for your business!

For less than a penny a day, this Excel 2007 driven family of powerful spreadsheets (the Financial Management Control Center or FMCC) makes it easy for you to keep track of vital information and make adjustments to your flight plan as the year unfolds so you can land safely at the end of the year.

FMCC comes as a self-installing program that creates a file folder on your computer (C:\Program Files\FMCC) and stores all its files there, and then places a shortcut on your desktop. Clicking the shortcut starts the program.

Opening Your Cockpit

When you start the program, this is the first “cockpit screen” you will see. The program comes with a 147-page manual that teaches you, step by step and screen by screen, how to use the program and analyze your business.

There is also a link to the Practice Exercises, a workbook of 121 pages that will take you through each of the system’s 40 spreadsheets with real-life examples so you can learn by doing. (There is also a 49-page answer key to go with the Exercise manual.)

You may also click the link to Lodestar’s web site if you wish to browse the blog, download free articles, or order additional software.

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Launching the Spreadsheets

But the heart of the system is the “Run the Software” option, which gives you access to 40 powerful spreadsheets grouped in to nine powerful workbooks.

You will begin by creating your own data “vault”, a file that will hold all your vital financial data and which each of the 40 spreadsheets taps to do their jobs.

You have three areas you can explore:  Where We Have Been, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going.

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Where We Have Been

As you might suspect, Where We Have Been helps you to figure out how you got to where you are today. Here you will encounter five main spreadsheet groups (or “workbooks”). Begin with the General Analysis workbook, which contains three spreadsheets designed to give you a high-level view of your business before you dive down into the details.

• The Management Effectiveness worksheet asks you 20 questions. Your answers will reveal where you are already doing a fine job, and show you areas where you need to spend some effort to get better.
• The worksheet titled What About Retirement shows you the value of building a strong retirement portfolio (or thriving business you can sell) so you can retire with the lifestyle you have always dreamed of having.
• The What Is It Worth worksheet helps you determine what your business might be worth when and if you decide to sell it.

Next, you can work in the Financial Analysis workbook. Here, you will be able to explore several important interpretations of your financial data.

• Income Statement lets you examine your income statement and automatically casts it for up to eight divisions (such as installation, service, service agreements, commercial, and so on). You can then view dashboard style gauges that show you how you stack up to “normal” businesses. You can print a gross breakdown (“Installation and Service”), individual division breakdowns, and even a simplified version of your income statement to use in employee information meetings, should you desire to hold them.
• Balance Sheet simply shows your balance sheet. This worksheet feeds data to the next spreadsheet…
• Ratios Analysis. This spreadsheet runs 24 key financial ratios, reporting your results and showing how you stack up to others in your size category and state of residence.
• The Accounts Receivable Factoring sheet shows you how your accounts receivable shrinks in value the older the receivables become. You can then model how a more aggressive collection process can dramatically improve your cash flow.
• The Weekly Cash Report can be run by your office staff in a few minutes and shows you at a glance what the week’s expected cash inflows and outflows will be so you’ll know by Monday morning what you can expect to happen that week.

In the Sales Analysis section you can evaluate your present sales management process. In this cutting edge workbook, you’ll have a chance to…

• Evaluate various Compensation Plans. This worksheet lets you model several different compensation models to find the one that best suits you and sufficiently motivate your sales people.
• The Sales Scorecard can be run every week (or month) and gives each sales person a simple measurement of how well they are doing and whether they are getting better at their craft.
• Finally, the System Impacts worksheet shows all those in sales why it is important to try to sell complete systems instead of jus replacing system components.

The Jobs Analysis workbook lets you input data from recently completed jobs to run critical measures of job efficiency and success. Basing everything in this workbook on the vital Material to Labor ratio, the program shows you what kind of jobs you shine on—and which ones are knocking you for a loop. The worksheet then generates five graphs that let you view the results in an easy-to-interpret format.

The final workbook in the Where We Have Been section is the Installation Analysis workbook. This handy tool lets you do several key tests:

• Labor Use lets you measure how well you are using your labor and how many “hidden installers” may be lurking in the inefficiency. Why hire more people when you may already have all the hands you need if you can just increase the efficiency?
• Once you have measured how efficient you are, you can then investigate your “street” rate (what you charge per hour for an installer). Be ready for some surprises!
• The Productivity Bonus worksheet lets you model a simple but effective motivational program to get more production out of installers.
• And finally, the Breakeven Analyzer lets you measure your breakeven volume on an annual, monthly, weekly and daily basis. Knowing your breakeven is like knowing how much fuel you have on board and how much farther you can fly.

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Where We Are

In this part of FMCC you get to figure out what you are doing now and how to do it better.

Start with the Job Management workbook. Here, you’ll have a chance to do two vital steps in good labor utilization:

• The Labor Analysis Worksheet lets you analyze any job to find out if there were labor problems and if so, where they arose.
• The Job Planner lets you plan work as much as five months in advance. You have a chance to spot instantly then when you are going to be undersold on labor capacity and alert you to that fact in time to let you try to find jobs to sell your unsold capacity.

Perhaps some of the most powerful worksheets in the entire FMCC system occur in the Job Takeoff and Costing set of worksheets. Here, you can…

• Print a simple Job Takeoff Sheet for use in the field to capture job material and labor needs, sketch out details, measure existing equipment and so on.
• Use the Dual Factor Pricing worksheet you compare the traditional single factor divisor job pricing method (used by most contractors and, as it turns out, wrongly) to two dual factor methods that recover overhead correctly and give you a powerful edge in the market when it comes to pricing high-material jobs.
• Run two related worksheets, AOR Pricing and Costing and RNC Pricing and Costing, detailed worksheets that let you assemble a complete bill of material and labor estimates for residential and light commercial replacement (AOR) and new construction (RNC) jobs. Once the bill of material is assembled, the price will display using the three methods covered in the Dual Factor Pricing worksheet explores. Jobs can be saved to disk and opened after the job is done and the same file can be used for quick job pricing, letting you spot in seconds where you are making mistakes on job management.
• Create a Retail Price Book, a simple 9-page printout that lets sales people in the field quickly and accurate figure jobs. You have your choice of making a costs book, a retail price book, or a complete installed price book, all with a few mouse clicks and some simple inputs.

The Service Management workbook helps you build a powerful and profitable service division by helping you…

• Analyze your Labor Use. Before you hire new technicians, are you using your present ones to best advantage? How high is your labor SEER? Find out!
• Set a correct and profitable Street Rate with the Street Rate worksheet. (Better than calling your competition with a disguised voice and using the average!)
• Check out how to correctly Price Parts. Examine several pricing methods to find one that works best for you and returns an average of 65% gross margin.
• The Productivity Bonus worksheet lets you reward service techs on flat rate systems who sell more labor per day than they charge to you. Both you and the tech make more money in this system.
• The Breakeven Analyzer does for your service department what a similar worksheet does for your installation operations.
• The Service To AOR Balance worksheet shows you how to properly staff the service department so it is the right size to efficiently generate leads and pump jobs to your replacement divisions. Too much service work can actually reduce your hourly profits, and not enough can starve your replacement division.
• The Service Tech P&L lets you turn each service truck into its own profit center and generate a monthly P&L on a tech by tech basis. This is a powerful tool when it comes time to review performance or discuss raises!
• The Residential Service Agreements worksheet helps you to quickly and accurately compute residential service agreement prices for three types of agreement: inspection only, maintenance, and full-coverage. The program also generates a simple one-page pricing guide sheet for service techs to use in the field when they quote an agreement to a customer.
• The Commercial Service Agreement worksheet lets you compute a service agreement price (again, three levels) for commercial jobs using direct expansion refrigerant cooling systems. (No hydronics.) Any size job and DX equipment can be covered accurately and easily.

 

The Advertising Management workbook is designed to help you get better control of advertising expenses and results.

• Begin with the Leads Analysis worksheet to determine where you are getting your most lucrative leads now and how much those leads are costing you. The worksheet even generates a tally sheet for the receptionist to use when taking calls. Graphs can be viewed that show you at a glance your most successful media sources and results.
• Once you know your best media for results, you can run the Budget Worksheet. Here you can allocate funds to promote each of the types of business you want to promote.
• Finally, you can model a Clean and Check Program to help you sell those unsold service hours in the pre-season. You can run either a spring program or a fall program, or both. You can model the costs to promote the program and estimate the cash flows that you can expect from the program.

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Where We Are Going

Once you know how your business got to where it is and how it is doing things day to day, you are ready to project what the future may hold for you. Accurate and fact-based forecasting is the hallmark of all truly successful businesses. The Forecasting and Planning workbook draws upon your historical data to help you model a future (or several futures, as it takes only a few minutes to generate forecasts). You can start with…

• The Profit Impactors worksheet. This simple worksheet shows how changing only four basic areas of your business—the volume of work you do, how you price it, how you control your costs, and how you manage your overhead—can have stunning impacts on your net profits. (For example, if the typical contractor changes each of these four areas by just 2% he can realize about 140% more net profit!) Model any type of business move you want to try and know in minutes if that move is sound or not.
  • A sub-set of this worksheet is the Flat Rate Pricing Scenario. The Profit Impactors worksheet has been set up for you to quickly and easily model what can happen to your business when you go onto flat rate pricing for the service department. Be ready to be stunned!
  • A second sub-set is the Add a Salesperson Scenario sheet. You can, in a few minutes, predict what a new sales person must sell to breakeven. Any sales above that number generate profits. And you will be surprised how little it takes for a salesperson to carry their weight!
• In Biz Plan Lite, you can put together a simple business plan that lets you model your residential, commercial and service operations for the coming year. Not as robust or as technical as a business plan you would need for a bank loan, it is most importantly a practical hands-on plan you can actually work with day in and day out.
• The Long-Term Growth worksheet lets you build a long-term (decade or so) growth plan that shows you what you’ll need in terms of capital and human resources. Like the tortoise in the fable, slow and steady wins the race!
• Finally, you can do the grand finale, the Sales Forecast worksheet. This powerful program lets you forecast sales and expenses next year on a month-by-month basis and shows you projected profits (and losses) by month. It even projects how much labor  you’ll need each month, and if you supply the data it wants for the cash flow section, even let you model your cash flow for the year so you can spot (and anticipate) months of bad flow and leverage months of strong flow. Users of this worksheet have actually reported to me that based on the printout of this one file alone, their banks have given them better credit terms!

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Your Security is Guaranteed

For your protection, most of the worksheets in the FMCC contain macros, short programs that automate complex tasks and let you run them by merely clicking a button on the screen. All FMCC workbooks and worksheets are digitally signed by Lodestar’s code signing certificate, assuring you the macros they contain are pure and undefiled by third parties.

System Requirements for FMCC

To run FMCC, you’ll need:

• Windows 7 or equivalent OS (Vista or later). FMCC will not work on earlier Windows platforms.
• Microsoft Office 2007 or later (or its equivalent).
• Microsoft Excel 2007 or later. Earlier versions of Excel are incompatible with FMCC’s macros and formulas.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.00 or later (you can download Reader for free at Adobe’s web site, www.adobe.com.)

The files take up approximately 26 MB.

 

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How to Order

 

Due to the large file size this program is only available on a CD-ROM for $179.95.  Click here to download the order form.  Upon verification of your payment, a CD-ROM will be mailed to you and should be in your possession with seven days of placing your order.

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Money Back Guarantee

Lodestar guarantees that the workmanship of the CD-ROM will be free of defects. Should you receive a damaged CD, Lodestar will promptly replace it for you.

Lodestar also guarantees the software to perform as stipulated in the license agreement (which you can read before installation; if you do not wish to be bound by the agreement, do not install the software) . Should you decide the license agreement is not to your best interest, do not install the program. Instead, contact Lodestar for instructions on how to return the CD and get a refund.

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     Read what Others have Said about this Program

“I used this program to plot a new course for my business. When I started, my accounts payable was $20,000 past due. I first departmentalized my P&L and discovered a huge problem in the Service department. Overhead was way out of line! And my pricing was way off. So I addressed these problems and now, four months later, I went from a loss to a net profit and improved my cash flow so much that I am now current with my suppliers!”

- contractor in Gaffney, SC

 

“I have spent considerable time screwing down overhead percentages by department by division. Until this program, we have only analyzed overhead by division (service and contracting) and not by department within each division. It was just too cumbersome to drill that deep. But this program makes it a snap! We have already found many areas in each department where we can make improvements.”

                     — contractor in Cincinnati, OH

 

“We did our first cash flow analysis ever with this software. It told us we didn’t have the capital necessary to expand. During some months we had a very negative cash flow. But the analysis showed us that a 3% price increase would get us where we needed to be, so we raised our prices.  And we never looked back! This program helped us transform our service department from a loser to a profit center. The service agreement tools were a big help too! And thanks to the forecasting unit, we know when to go to the bank to borrow money, and how much to borrow.”

                              — contractor in Janesville, WI

 

“This is an outstanding program!”

                              — contractor in San Antonio, TX

 

“I stayed up half the (first) night loading information into the Vault and taking a look at my business. It was a night well spent!”

                             — contractor, Sacramento, CA