Soliciting Ideas to Help Improve Our Financial Standing

The above photo is the school where I serve. For the last three years, I have been the Academic Dean of the School. With the new president, I was assigned to transfer post from the academics to business and finance. My plan is to transfer there by the second week of February. However, situation calls for early intervention. And so, I started this week in my new assignment as the Business Manager of the school while overseeing the modules, preparing for the enrollment, and transitioning my tasks to the new acting Academic Dean.

@savvytester reminded me two days ago that I haven’t made any single long post for the past 10 days. The modules and the transition explain why this is the case. Even my game play in Splinterlands suffered. Three days before the end of the current season, I managed to just have three EOS chests so far and reach Gold III League.

Being the new financial overseer of our institution, I have this question in mind hoping that the LeoFinance community can help me in stirring up new ideas how to address our situation. This is like outsourcing ideas out there to help us change our financial standing. And this is my question:

What financial advice can you give to an educational institution that is rich in terms of assets but poor in terms of liquidity?

By liquidity, I mean cash. Asset rich but cash poor, that’s our situation.

A few people in the business world told us that we are not managing our assets well, and I agree, but I was not in the position then to make some institutional changes. All I can do is propose and suggest, but it is up to those who are directly responsible to act upon those suggestions. Now that I am in such a position, I want to help our school to become financially strong.

Obviously investing in crypto in general and HIVE in particular are out. The institution does not understand it and the space is too “mysterious” for them. So, the kind of idea that will work is something within the conventional finance. Some details playing in my mind:

• Hire a corporate financial analyst to analyze our financial statements such as the Income Statement, the Balance Sheet, and the Cashflow Statement.

• Let this analyst produce a document that will serve as a proposal to boost our financial standing as an institution. Let him come up with Income Generating Projects (IGPs) to support the accomplishment of our institutional vision, mission, and goals (VMGs).

• And this question comes to mind: Is it legal or legitimate for a non-profit educational institution to be involved in investment opportunities? I intend to raise this question to a few accountants and the financial planner that we will be hiring.

• Utilize the Balance Sheet. Use an idle or an unproductive asset as collateral for bank financing. The question is where to use the fund that can be acquired from financing? Of course, it’s not for salary increase. That will come later. What I have in mind is something where we can invest, an investment that will give us the yield not only to pay the interest for our debt, but also to give us an additional income.

• Utilize the Cashflow Statement most especially the cashflow from financing and the cashflow from investment.

The above are my initial thoughts.

Being an advocate of financial literacy since 2009, I am reminded that in the business world “cashflow” is considered king and “leverage” is the queen. In the kind of economy and monetary system that we have now, those who flourish are those who know how to use the liabilities side of the balance sheet; in short, those who are not afraid to take the risk using financing or bank credit.

Not all debts are bad. It depends on how you use it. There are bad debts and good debts. Bad debts are those which you use for salary or to purchase equipment and tools that don’t provide a yield. This will make a bad financial standing even worse. Good debts on the other hand are those which you use to generate income to support your VMGs.

A disclaimer at this point. These are just the spontaneous ideas that come to mind while considering our financial situation as an institution. None of this is to be considered professional. This is amateurish. The reason why I want to publish this is to solicit ideas from Hivians and lions to help strengthen the financial standing of our institution. Who knows? This might be a way to promote Hive among our students and my fellow faculty members. This might get them interested once they see results. Of course, HBD will be my recommended digital asset for them.

Grace and peace!

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