I hated maths at school. I wasn’t bad at it – I just didn’t enjoy it. 

In fact, I wasn’t a big fan of school altogether. When I finished school at 16, I didn’t know what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go. I was a little lost. Thankfully, I had a good career advisor who found me two apprenticeship opportunities to choose from – finance or freight. I may have been a young whipper-snapper, but even then I knew that a life of crunching numbers wasn’t for me… So I chose freight. 

And 35 years on, I’m so glad I did…but if I thought freight would get me away from doing the maths, oh, how wrong I was! You see, freight is all about the numbers, from calculating container capacities to freight rates, calculating customs fees to cargo volumes, there’s no end the the number crunching involved in moving goods around the world. 

But those days are mostly behind me now, as the team handles most of the day-to-day here at Millennium. Does that mean that my number-crunching days are behind me? Absolutely not. You see, as a business owner, numbers are even more important than ever. Understanding the numbers in your business can be the difference between making a profit and going bust. Most business owners I speak to have a good grasp of the basics – they probably wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t! They know their sales and turnover, expenses, taxes and probably profits. But that’s just the basics. 

If I were to dig a little deeper, they probably wouldn’t know what the cost of acquiring a new customer is? What that customer is worth over their whole lifetime with the company? How much each member of staff generates in revenue? How this stacks up against their employment costs?  The list goes on…

Now, you might be thinking…Oh Chadd, that’s not for me. My business doesn’t need that level of detail. But I’d argue otherwise. Not making enough profit? Marketing spend too high? Cashflow unstable? Growth too slow? I’ve been in business for over 25 years and what I’ve learned is that the often the solution to your biggest problem is right often there in your numbers. You just have to look.

So how about you, do you keep on top of your numbers? Do you truly know exactly what’s going in every level of your business? What have your numbers taught you? I’d love to hear your stories…