Posts Tagged business support
Particularly troubling stock options
Posted by admin in material costs, ownership, performance objectives, production cycles on September 7th, 2009
Stock options are particularly troubling. In theory, employees who own stock will work to make the price of the stock rise. Therefore they are given the right to buy shares at a discount. Unfortunately, when new stock is issued to employees who exercise their stock options, your interest is diluted. In some companies, you will find your interest cut in half in a few years. CEOs of large companies average $4 million a year in stock options.
In addition, studies show that the share prices of companies that issue large amounts of stock options underperform the market. Even worse, employees benefit when the stock price collapses. Stock options are repriced or new stock options issued so employees can dilute your interest at a fraction of the cost. You get no benefit from a stock price collapse.
The grant of stock options also increases the volatility of your shares. Stock options are only valuable if the price of the stock rises above the option price. If the value declines, the options are worthless, and employees will not spend money to exercise them. This gives employees an incentive to bet the company on risky ventures such as mergers, acquisitions, untested products, untested markets, untested technology, and untested corporate structures. Employee stock options are no benefit to you whatsoever.
Do you have any business owning stocks?
Posted by admin in Companies, communication, economy, fixed costs on August 28th, 2009
At the micro level, a stock is an ownership interest in a business. The earnings from the business belong to the stockholders. Theoretically, the employees of the business, including top management, work for the stockholders.
In practice, the employees are self-interested. Every employee, from the CEO to the janitorial crew, wants as large a piece of the earnings as possible, leaving as little for you as can be justified. You may have emotional difficulty with this built-in conflict of interest.
Elaborate schemes are routinely employed to siphon off your interests. In the old days, two-thirds of profits were paid out as dividends, giving you direct control of a large portion of earnings. Today, dividends are cut or eliminated so employees can use profits as they see fit. Fewer than half of today’s stocks pay any dividends at all. Every year the number of dividend payers declines. Even those that pay dividends pay only token amounts. Instead, employees grant themselves raises and bonuses without consulting shareholders. Insider boards of directors grant themselves profit-sharing plans, stock, and stock options, all to your deficit. Board remuneration committees offer excessive pay for executives in exchange for excessive pay for themselves.
The few profits that are left are often squandered on ill-advised acquisitions and other schemes. Hundreds of examples could be cited including the recent debacles at Enron, Lucent, Rite Aid, Millennium, Color Tile, Dow Chemical, Sunbeam, Trump Hotels & Casinos, Reliance Groups, and many Internet, tech, and telecom firms that crashed in 2000-2001.
The Management Function in Budgeting – part 1
Posted by admin in budget, effective budgeting, equity, market demand, market forecasts on August 2nd, 2009
A budget is not a budget until it has been carefully scrutinized by management. Even if the numbers add up correctly, they may not have been estimated properly. It’s middle-management’s job to assemble the budget, but it’s upper-management’s job to question the budget. They do this because the budget is the financial tool that will guide the organization in the coming year. Not only does it need to be accurate, it needs to be well-considered and realistic.
In our example, the company missed the mark rather dramatically, showing a profit margin 22 percent less than the one projected in the budget. What questions should management ask?
Why is the projected actual so far off from the budgeted amount? Perhaps it was the fault of the budgetingprocess being too optimistic or of a budget based on considerations unrealistic to the current situation. Perhaps there was a significant change in market conditions or materials costs. In any of these scenarios, management needs to understand why before it can accurately assess the new year’s budget.
Production costs for Units A, B, and C do not match their profit scenario. What gives? It may be that the unit production varies and standardization needs to be applied. If a more costly unit is not earning more exponentially, it may mean that (a) the unit is improperly priced, or (b) demand has slacked off and there’s too much inventory left in the warehouse. In either case, management must look at production standards and market demand before budgeting unit-production figures for the new year.
Drafting a Budget
Posted by admin in Real estate, production cycles, profit margin, profit projections, short-term income on August 2nd, 2009
So what does a budget look like? There are numerous variations, but the goal of any budget is to clearly communicate revenue and cost centers so that profit statements can be drafted and management of resources, including income, can be better accomplished. To that degree, all budgets tend to look the same.
For the sake of this lesson, let’s assume our unit maker described earlier has been in business several years and is charged with budgeting for next year. That means he will have budgets from previous years from which to draft future business plans. The operational budget, then, likely will break revenue and expense components down to three columns:
1. The current year’s budget, or what he originally projected his income and expenses to be.
2. The current year’s projected year-end actual expenses and revenues. Even if it’s a guess, which it tends to be, it must be as accurate a guess as possible.
3. The next year’s budget, which tends to be a hybrid between the actual budget, the year-end projected actuals, and a best guess for what the new year will bring.
Fixed and Variable Costs in fiction – part 3
Posted by admin in management skills, manufacturing, marketing, material costs, performance objectives on August 1st, 2009
Decisions over semi-variable costs, such as marketing expenses, may be made based on the number of units you need to sell, but they likely are not unit-specific—unless, for example, the marketers decide to give away something free with each purchase. However, if we were to add an additional $5,000 in marketing expense to our 5,000-unit run, we add an additional dollar in semi-variable cost to each item. The same $5,000, spent on the 10,000-unit run, would add an additional 50 cents per piece.
The net cost, then, on the 5,000 unit run jumps to $8 per unit. Costs for the 10,000 unit run jump to $6.50. The net profit margins are $1 and $2.50 per unit, respectively.
Even with these costs applied, it should be evident that the higher this particular production run, the wider the profit margin. That’s all part of the sales income, to be sure. But the profitability per unit is determined primarily by the fixed and semi-variable costs. And that’s influenced by the budgeting procedure.
Fixed and Variable Costs in fiction – part 2
Posted by admin in Companies, effective budgeting, equity, material costs, profit margin on August 1st, 2009
But now let’s say each one of these units requires $3 worth of raw materials and another $2 in assembly charges to create, or $5 per unit. Since those costs are based on the number of units being produced, those costs are variable with the production flow. If you produce 5,000 units, that’s a variable cost of $25,000. Add to that your $10,000 per year in fixed costs, and you have overall production costs of $35,000, or $7 per unit. At a sales price of $9, the profit margin is $2 per unit.
But let’s increase production to 10,000 at $5 per unit in materials and assembly charges. That’s $50,000 in variable costs, plus $10,000 in fixed costs, for a total of $60,000 for 10,000 units. The price per unit is now $6, which yields a profit margin of $3 per unit.
Word About Costs When Creating a Budget Plan – part 2
Posted by admin in consulting, effective budgeting, production cycles, short-term income, variable costs on August 1st, 2009
Variable costs are a little different and allow you some budgeting flexibility. These are costs that fluctuate directly with the amount of business you support. Variable costs—costs that are business-dependent—include supply of goods and materials and, to some degree, part-time labor necessary to keep the business operating apace with demand.
Semi-variable costs are expenses with components that are fixed and components that are variable. For example, telephone expenses are semi-variable costs in that the monthly service charge is fixed and the charges for long-distance calls and the 800 number are variable.