Our Two Cents

It probably won’t happen today or tomorrow, but at some point, you’ll leave your company. Ideally, you’ll walk away wealthy—or at least wealthier than you are right now—ready to dive into retirement, the launch of your next business, the beginning of your career as an investor, or whatever the next stage of your life holds.

But exits don’t always happen the way we hope and dream they will. There are unavoidable crises, downturns, and other economic realities to contend with. Companies fail; in fact, fewer than half of small businesses in the US survive beyond a decade.

It sounds like an easy win. You take $200,000 from an investor right when you need it, with minimal back-and-forth negotiation and no debt obligations or loss of equity in the present.

Sure, there are some strings attached. In exchange for their financing, the investor has agreed to some percentage of ownership in your company at an unspecified future date. But you don’t need to worry about that now—you just secured seed funding without giving up any control in your company or borrowing money you may not be able to pay back.

There are things to love or hate about the latest executive order of a payroll tax holiday, such as:

• Eligible employees love the extra cash in their pockets that would ordinarily go to the government to spend or to save. Though as it stands now, that extra cash would need to be repaid at the end of the period...
• Employers hate the headache of implementing a new operation to their payroll process and accounting.

Believe it or not, 2020 is more than halfway over. It feels like we’ve lived through a decade since 2019.

Can you remember what you were doing around this time last year? What were your major priorities and projects back then?

Around this time last year, I was helping one of our clients prepare for conversations with investors. We were working diligently to get the company’s financial statements in order, ensure the books were accurate and up to date, develop the fundraising pitch, and create projections for the next 18 months. Everyone was feeling optimistic. The business had momentum, a strong value proposition, and the attention of several potential sources of capital.

Like so much of life these days, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) is unprecedented. Never before has so much money been loaned out to so many businesses so quickly. Equally astonishing is the fact that the government has agreed to forgive the loans for qualifying borrowers.

However, unprecedented also means untested, uncertain—and perhaps unfeasible. It’s no surprise that a program this big and this hastily rolled out has had numerous issues, limitations, and controversies.

 

Do not miss out on ways to improve your business’s liquidity

As COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, U.S. businesses have received historic government relief in exchange for its participation in the life-saving emergency shelter-in-place and social distancing orders of state governors.

As those same governors are lifting emergency stay-at-home orders, enabling non-essential workers to return to the shop floor or office, the need for government relief of business activity has remained a necessity.

 

Most accountants wouldn’t consider themselves responsible for managing workforce performance. But let’s pause and think about that for a second. When someone is feeling overwhelmed and under-supported at work, there’s almost always a financial factor involved.

 

It's a challenging time for teams and organizations that have suddenly jolted to working remotely. For startups and larger organizations, helping their teams with a generous dose of empathy, to enable productivity, is key.

Whether you're already a remote org or moving that way due to the current social climate, here are a few things we've done at Tara to shift quickly into a high functioning remote team.

 

It’s a hard time to be having a hard time. For those of us who are able to work from home and have remained gainfully employed or self-employed over the past few months, it feels selfish—even callous—to acknowledge how stressed we might feel.

Oh, quit whining, says the inner voice (mine sounds like my grandma). You have a job! You don’t even have to leave the house to do it! Do you know how lucky you are?

But that doesn’t change the facts. Despite how fortunate we are relative to others, many of us work-from-homers are nevertheless living through the most challenging period of our lives. We’re doing more with less, managing multiple roles, trying to bridge gaps with often flawed and unreliable technology, ping-ponging between times of crunch and times of existential uncertainty.

 

Giving back—it’s good for the world and it’s good for business. And there’s never been a more important time to do it.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all of us. Right now, millions of people are grieving loved ones while living in fear and struggling to stay afloat—physically, mentally, emotionally, financially. They’ve lost jobs, homes, businesses, and savings. Between food shortages, long periods of isolation, and a burgeoning global economic catastrophe, the present is dismal and the future looks bleak. It’s safe to say that this is the worst crisis of our lifetimes—and it could be months or even years before things get better.