Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially

Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement—along with a good cup of coffee!—to start the day. Today we discuss "capital".

Hopefully, the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week. Please feel free to forward the newsletter along to others who you think would benefit from the content.

Capital

If you have spent any time around accountants, you’ll be quickly educated on the difference between expense and capital budgets.

Basically, expenses budgets consist of the dollars that – as a manager – you have the ability to direct on a day-to-day basis. These are the “expenses” associated with running the business.

Conversely, capital budgets consist of the dollars that are to be invested in the budget for the long-term development of the business. They are separate from expense dollars, normally much smaller, and normally come with many more constraints.

This always fascinated me – I could sign a check for $100K in payroll expenses but needed approval of 17 people for a $5K capital expense for the replacement of any sort of equipment that had a depreciation schedule.

What’s this got to do with Monday Morning Motivation? A whole lot! You see, time is money and that’s why we need to think of “capital time” and “expense time”.

We spend our time each day working on the critical fires that arise. This “expense time” is gone at the end of each day. We don’t personally approve it; it just gets spent on the activities of our lives.

Conversely, all too often we forget to invest time in ourselves. To spend the “capital time” to improve our skills and talents so that we can be more effective.

Like I said, time is money; and, much as I hate to admit it, having different budgets and different controls, as the accountants taught us, what we do with money, is equally important as what we do with our time.

That brings us to this week’s challenge:

• Are you investing time to enhance your personal capital just as you would invest money to enhance your business capital?
  

Have a great week!

Curt

About MMM: Each week I publish “Monday Morning Motivation” in the hopes that one person will find a bit of inspiration and that inspiration will have a positive impact on their life. My motivation comes from experiences, reading, sermons, and discussions.

Blog post from this past week:

Monday Morning Motivation - Anchor