• WITH THE UNCERTAINTIES FACING SMALL BUSINESS ACTIVITY, REOPENING requires majorly different approaches to optimizing strategies for success – particularly financial forecasting & budgeting. Even in ‘normal’ pre-pandemic times, eight in ten small businesses fail every year, most commonly from not having: (1) marketed & maintained online presence; (2) monitored & paid attention to customer responsiveness & feedback; and (3) most critically, maintained adequate cash flow while building profits & sustainability. “In today’s ‘hustle culture,’ planning for financing options to provide a longer runway – i.e. time to fail before succeeding” via strategic forecasting & budgeting is a critical factor in survival. DCG can help. Call us for courtesy consultation.  [INC.COM – 7/18/20]
  • WHEN COMPANIES AND ORGANIZATIONS ELECT TO MERGE, the principal reasons always involve achieving synergies in operations and projected financial gains. Typically, acquisition of intellectual properties, client/customer markets, key suppliers, and executive/staff talent are also key factors. But a critical factor which often gets overlooked is the INTEGRATION process for people & teams from entities used to operating with differing styles and under differing cultures. ”To successfully integrate companies & cultures, business leaders must have an informed perspective on the synergies to be captured, the transformation opportunities to be pursued, the value to be created, and the cultural pitfalls to steer clear of.”  Successful integration process ensures that each set of stakeholders – customers/ suppliers/ investors/ employees/ directors & key advisors – have a realistic picture of long-term organizational structure, goals, objectives and expectations. When mergers or substantive acquisitions fail, the top reasons always include ‘unanticipated conflict’ among people. DCG have decades of experience in providing Cultural Congruity services: pre-merger evaluation of management, analysis & strategy for assimilation, and facilitation of post-merger integration. Call us for courtesy consultation in this crucial arena.  [McKINSEY – 7/14/20]
  • PANDEMIC-RELATED BUSINESS LOSSES MAY BE DEDUCTIBLE AS ‘DISASTER’ LOSS RETROACTIVELY ON 2019 TAX RETURNS. While the pandemic meets definition of a federally-declared Disaster, IRS has not specifically ruled on applicability. However, losses that might qualify could include spoiled inventories/ lost prepaid travel, event deposits, etc/ abandoned equipment or improvements/ terminated lease or contract payments/ location closure costs/ worthless partnership or stock due to business termination. Examples of losses which would NOT qualify are lost revenues or goodwill, and decrease in value of the business.  [SINGER LEWAK TAX ALERT –  8/3/20]
  • “AMERICAN PROGRESSIVES HAVE ADOPTED ‘RACIAL DIVERSITY’ AS A LESS MARTIAL VERSION OF SOCIALISM – the world’s worst idea, which will not die… Historically, socialism has consistently delivered the opposite of its promises: less economic & political inequality; more poverty, ruthless social domination of the poor and the marginalized, and more environmental degradation… At the bottom of all economic indices are two sorts of countries – failed states like Afghanistan, and nations like Venezuela, which have sauntered down the road to serfdom by enacting Marxist socialist policies with abandon; the records of mass murder and spoliation are quite easily accessed, the stories of Cuban refugees are at our fingertips, The Gulag Archipelago is only a click away… Maoism is in many ways an identifiably religious phenomenon, complete with devotion to a sacred book, adoration of icons, rites of confession & penance, and a benevolent god–man/prophet. Socialism speaks to the same anxieties and needs as religion, offering a moral principle – however insane and murderous – around which a life might be organized… If socialism is a kind of cult, this is not the doing of the young radicals, wrongheaded as they are. The moral vacuum is a creation of the bishops, university administrators and chairmen of Boards, who in the main long ago stopped believing in their own dogma, and instead that they could muddle through without another dogma’s taking its place.”   [NATIONAL REVIEW – 8/5/20]
  • THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK:

                    “We could certainly slow the aging process down if it had to work its way through Congress.”  – Will Rogers