US and Canada Expansion: Structuring Your Shipping Routes for Cost, Not Convenience
Every business owner I work with reaches the same crossroads once they decide to expand into North America. They’ve done the market research, they’ve found the distributor, the customer, the marketplace listing that’s about to go live and then someone asks the question that actually determines whether this expansion makes money or quietly drains it: […]
How to Know if Your Pricing is Profitable (And What to Do If It Isn’t)
You’re taking orders, delivering work, sending invoices. Business is ticking along. But at the end of each month, you find yourself wondering: where has all the money gone? If that sounds familiar, the answer might not lie in your costs, your team, or your processes, it could lie in your pricing. Knowing how to tell […]
Supply Chain Strategy for a Toy Importer
How Pauline helped to rationalise the company’s operations infrastructure. One of my clients is a family business spanning two generations. They were successfully importing and distributing toddler toys but knew that they could do more. The business purchased manufactured goods from the UK and overseas to sell in the UK, Netherlands and France. They also […]
Shared Container vs Full Container: The Real Cost-Benefit Breakdown
Every few weeks, a client asks me some version of the same question: should we wait until we can fill a full container, or ship a smaller, shared load now? It sounds like a logistics question. It isn’t. It’s a cash flow question wearing a shipping container’s clothes. After more than two decades working inside […]
How to Choose Your First Overseas Warehouse Location
Choosing the right overseas warehouse location is one of the biggest decisions a growing business will make when expanding into new markets and it’s also one of the easiest to get wrong. Many years ago, working with an international hardware brand, we had a warehouse in the Northwest, but 90% of the customers were freighting […]
Vetting Overseas Suppliers – What I Learned Standing on Factory Floors in China
I’ve lost count of the exact number, but it’s somewhere around nineteen trips to Chinese manufacturing regions over the course of my career. Nineteen sets of jet lag, nineteen rounds of tea ceremony small talk before getting down to business, and nineteen opportunities to learn that almost everything useful about vetting overseas suppliers is invisible […]
Profit vs Cash Flow: Why Profitable Businesses Run Out of Money
I get this call more often than you’d think. Someone rings me, and they’re baffled. “Pauline, my accountant just showed me the year-end figures and we made a decent profit. So why is my bank balance sitting at almost nothing, and why did I have to ring the bank manager last month to ask for […]
Part Time CFO Recommended by the Bank
Pauline gives professional advice to a company that wants to expand. Another of my clients was a UK manufacturing business making their own outdoor clothing for UK and Europe. They were looking to grow and expand and their bank suggested part time support from a CFO for their next phase of growth plans. This was […]
Fractional CFO for Importers and Exporters: Why Contacts Matter More Than Spreadsheets
If you’re searching for a fractional CFO for importers and exporters, here’s the honest answer most advisors won’t give you: the numbers only tell half the story. The other half lives in your network. When clients come to me about scaling internationally, the conversation usually starts with numbers: margins, freight costs, exchange rates, lead times. […]
Why Revenue Growth Doesn’t Increase Profits
I’ve sat across the table from a lot of business owners who’ve just had their best year on paper. Revenue is up. The team is stretched but proud. And then they ask me, almost sheepishly, some version of the same question I’ve heard a hundred times: “Why isn’t my profit growing as fast as my […]