Posts Tagged ‘charity’

It is a tradition in our home for me to make sweet potato pies for the holidays.  Jenna and I spent the night before thanksgiving cooking 4 pies for the Thanksgiving feast, and while stirring the pie filling, we came up with a fun way to give back to our community.

We created a tiny charity called Granny Annie’s Charity Pies that will donate 20 pies and $1,000 to two Indianapolis charities this holiday season.

Here’s the fun part; Jenna chose to marry someone who thinks about small business leadership at least 100 hours per week, and I chose to marry a CPA.  So, while the pies were cooking, we literally began writing a business plan and budget for our December charity project.

The first place we started is the first place that any successful business owner should start their business planning: profitability.  We spent an hour determining our cost of goods sold and break-even point.

“An hour,” you say?  “What took you so long?”

Well, when was the last time that you thought about the fact that there are 10.65 teaspoons in 1.81 ounces of nutmeg, and that a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg costs $.14?  Exactly.  We had to convert teaspoons to dry and wet ounces, ounces per pie, dollars per ounce, and dollars per pie.  I don’t think I have ever used so much 8th grade math in one setting!  (remember cross-multiplying and dividing, anyone???)

I realized how powerful this exercise was when we got to the end and knew exactly how to control our costs per pie, knew exactly how many pies we need to sell to break-even (38.33 pies to be exact), and how many pies we have to sell in order to give $1000 to charity (105 pies)!

This is the essence of controlling your business from the inside out through the accounting “key-performance indicator”.  When you are able to track every dollar that goes into producing and delivering your product or service, you will have financial control of your business.  If you want to know more about how to do this, attend reachmore’s next Launch class.

If you would like to help out a couple of charities by ordering some holiday pies, email me at jamar@goreachmore.com.

Happy Holidays!

Jamar Cobb-Dennard is the Vice-President of Business Development for Reachmore, which provides leadership coaching for small business and executives.  Email Jamar at jamar@goreachmore.com for the latest on Reachmore’s newest seminar, Launch.