Job and Career Questions? JOB Fair in Santa Barbara Patty DeDominic

Calling all Career Resources and Employers!!

There will be career resources and a special Job Fair area--at the 

California  Women's Festival  on March 5 & 6, 2010 in Santa Barbara.

If you would like to register,  please visit    http://www.womensfestivals.org/   

Scholarships are available if you apply on line  and request a scholarship due to financial need.  

Special Student rate of only $25.00

EMPLOYERS please consider attending and talking to outstanding California Job Candidates:

For more information please fill our the exhibitor form

http://www.womensfestivals.org/exhibit-womens-conference.php

Put    "Employer"  on your application  for a 20% discount.     If you apply and pay prior to  February 2, 2010.    

Patty DeDominic invites you to get up close and personal with inspiring resources and connections which can make a world of difference in your career.   This Career Fair and Conference is open to men and women from all over the USA with special emphasis on Southern California.    

Meet representatives from the National Association of Women Business Owners  http://www.nawbo.org/        SCORE, free counseling for those who wish to start or expand their businesses;    UCSB Career Center and UCSB Women's Center;   Girls Inc,  Women's Economic Ventures;    Green2gold.org;  Future Women CEOs;  

Conference and Job Fair is open to men and women of all ages.

Earl Warren ShowGrounds

Friday March 5, 2010     4-8 PM

Saturday March 6, 2010   8-6pm

visit  http://www.womensfestivals.org/   or   write  info@womensfestivals.org    for more information.

This conference is co sponsored by community leaders, not profit organizations and private corporations including AT&T, Wells Fargo Bank,  Santa Barbara Bank and Trust,  Ricoh-USA, Christie Communications, The Weidemann Foundation,  Gold, global organization for leadership and diversity & DeDominic & Associates.   Event produced by Patty DeDominic     

Mentoring for Managers, Career Development Tools, more from Al Walsh

Financial Statements for Dummies - A Career Development Tool

Don't know how to read Financials?
Paraphrasing the popular “how-to” books, this article is a basic primer on understanding Financial Statements.
It’s scary to me how many business managers can’t read their own company’s Financials. Even some business owners barely understand their own Financials (and, scarily enough, some Finance people too).
Any manager who wants to advance beyond the status of “junior flunkie” should have at least a cursory understanding.
I’m not going to get involved in double-entry accounting and debits & credits. That would just confuse you and it’s unnecessary for this discussion. If you have no idea what I was just talking about, accountants post two entries for every transaction; a debit and a credit. It’s called double-entry accounting. Enough said.
All you accountants out there can now close the article and go away. This is basic stuff.


So here goes:

The two basic Financial Statements are the Balance Sheet and The Income Statement (or P&L).

Let’s talk about the Balance Sheet first:
The Balance Sheet is a reflection of the financial makeup and standing of the company at any point in time - usually at each month-end. It is a roll-up of every transaction the company’s done from day-one to present. It reflects EVERYTHING that’s happened; including Profit or Loss (more on that later).

The Balance Sheet is made up of three broad categories: Assets Liabilities and Net Worth (or Owners’ Equity). The total of Assets always equals the total of Liabilities plus Net Worth. (Assets = Liabilities + Net Worth)

Assets = the things the company owns: Cash, Accounts Receivable, Inventory, Land, Equipment, etc. If you prepay insurance, or some other purchase, you would also post an asset entry here.
Liabilities are the debts of the company: Accounts Payable, Bank Debt, Car Loans, etc. They’re split up between Current Liabilities (the money due within the current fiscal year) and Long-Term Debt (Amounts due beyond the current fiscal year).
Last, we have Net Worth (Owners Equity).
Net Worth contains: Any money invested in the company minus any dividends paid plus the net total of all annual profits (negative for losses) since day one (called Retained Earnings) plus the total of profits (negative for losses) in the current year.

Not too difficult, huh? Now let’s talk about the Income Statement (P&L):
The Income Statement is a reflection of all Revenues and Expenses for the current year; in other words, the company’s profitability. The bottom-line number is Net Profit, which = all Revenues less all Expenses. Remember I said earlier that the Balance Sheet reflects ALL transactions of the company? The Net Profit total of the Income Statement flows to the Balance Sheet as the total of current year profits in the Net Worth section. At each year-end, the Income Statement zeros out to begin a new year. On the Balance Sheet, the current year profit in the Net Worth section transfers to the Retained Earnings total and the current year profit value goes back to zero for the start of a new year. If you’re confused, read this a couple times and you’ll get the hang of it. This is where beginning accounting students start getting glaze-eyed, but it’s not that tough. Just sleep on it.

That basically sums up your two key Financial Statements. There are others, but unless you’re heavily involved in the numbers you don’t have to know those. With an understanding of these two, you can get a decent handle on the company’s status.
I didn’t get into some of the more complex stuff like Capital Purchases vs Expenses, or Depreciation, or some of the hinky accounting transactions, but that’s okay. That’s a set of topics for another day.
If you’re still confused, get your hands on some Financials and go find the categories mentioned in this article. It will come to you.
I hope this helps.

Larry Melby, Thoughts from an Entrepreneur, "I smell a Rat"

Larry, Please give us your thoughts on this Economic Meltdown.
Larry ran a successful staffing firm for many years and he has
been an advocate for special needs employees as well as a delegate
to the White House Conference on Small Business.


The first thing that I feel has often been left out of the discussion is that the people in charge of dealing with this mountain of debt were piloting the plane when it hit the mountain. Yet we put them in charge of raising bigger mountains. It does not make sense to me. Back in the spring of 2008, I heard about the derivatives problem and it was then pegged at $62 tri. (Is that the abbreviation of ‘trillion’?) I cannot comprehend that amount of money as it is over 4 times our Gross Domestic Product. I also never understood derivatives. It seemed to me like a huge gambling program played by the rich.

Now we find that while everybody was watching their chips, the bank vanished.

Back in 1998, there was the unraveling of Long Term Capital Management. I would have thought that regulators would have put some controls in place at that time, but obviously, they didn’t. This is an even further concern since we have had both the republicans and democrats in charge of the regulators since then. Who is watching the regulators?

Does anybody know what will happen when these derivatives do unravel? Who is going to be left holding the bag and how will it be decided?

For some time it has seemed that we have too many insiders in charge of their own industries. The financial melt down just confirms that. Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch’s all have their fingerprints on the mortgage crash. I have to believe that if I could see this crash coming before 2005, when I sold my house, then these people who were paid to know should have known. I smell a rat, but like LTCM in 1998, there is little movement toward an investigation and indictments. The most plausible reason is that without these rating agencies, fund managers would have to do real research and they don’t want that responsibility. You still have to believe, however, that if I knew that the rating agencies were complicit with the mortgage bundlers in creating AAA ratings, then these “Masters of the Universe” knew. It is obvious that they were also fairly certain that they would not get into any trouble. I read late last spring, although I can’t remember where, that a manager at one of the rating agencies told his workers that they would all “be rich and retired” before the bubble burst. I also read, but did not bookmark, that when asked about a mortgage rating from Fitch’s, “What will happen if real estate prices go down?” The answer was, “Our models don’t allow for that.”

Finally, what about sharpening our intuition, or as you put it, watching for the tiger? With this, my being a living troglodyte really shows. The most important thing that business people can do now is to limit their debt. Our firm was the only one in our industry that did not factor our receivables. I always thought that running your company on borrowed money made the banker your partner. A partner who did not share your goals and didn’t care about you or your people—truly the tiger. It shows now, when perfectly good companies are having their loans called. Our company’s cash management plan called for using a line of credit in the summer, when sales were expanding and paying it off when sales slowed and receivables caught up at the start of the new year. Another aspect of our company’s cash flow was that all of the bonuses were paid on collections, not sales. The bonuses shrank by half for every 30 days that a debt went unpaid and were zero after 90 days. (Bonuses also made up half of the compensation for all of our salaried people.) This put the people in charge of sales also in charge of collections.

Here is my advice for those who survive this downturn:

o Pay down your debts so that any time you borrow it is for an increase in activities that will generate the additional funds needed to repay the debt and you know exactly when you will repay.
o Discipline your customers to a 30 day or less pay cycle. You are not their banker and you can not afford them as a customer if they think you are. If you have the best service, they will be back.
o Orient your entire work force, especially salespeople, to the idea that the money has to get into the bank before you can use it.