3 Ways to Increase Cash Flow in Your Business

The 2021 holiday sales season will give businesses a chance to continue their online migration, as well as opportunities for more refinement and improvements. The key is to bring as many products online as possible and integrate all customer touch points into an omnichannel of positive experiences. 


Let’s take a look at some trends in retail we can apply to many other industries. These trends can strengthen your business and position you for success in the future. 

Strong E-Commerce Presence

Consumers did more online shopping last year, and the trend is expected to continue beyond the pandemic. For this reason, all businesses should strengthen their online presence, especially their e-commerce presence. 


Many retail establishments benefit from a complete ecommerce solution, including a storefront, shopping cart, online payment process, and automated fulfillment. 


They can expand their online shopping experience by considering these features:


  • Enable chat features between customers and staff to answer customer questions.
  • For clothing, post detailed sizing charts, imitate the dressing room mirror with try-on automation, and use photos of models in all shapes and sizes.
  • Create how-to videos to show customers ways to effectively use your product.
  • Expand photography so customers can see all angles of the product and how it’s used.
  • Display and sort user reviews to help customers decide. 
  • Implement clear navigation and search options so customers can find what they want. Many customers research online, and then visit your physical store to finalize their transaction.


Expanding your e-commerce presence isn’t only a to-do for retail businesses. Businesses in the services space have also implemented appointment-setting and payment processing. Real estate agents have enhanced virtual home tours. Many businesses with physical goods and documents have also beefed up delivery options and implemented curbside pickup. 


Each business has a unique sales cycle customers go through when purchasing products and services. The question for business owners: How can you bring most of that experience online?

Mobile Optimization 

The vast majority of transactions now occur on mobile devices. If your business’s mobile presence is not optimized, you’ll want to make it a priority this year to catch up with your competitors.

Social Presence 

More consumers are using social media—Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Clubhouse, and Facebook—to discover and purchase items they love. Wise business owners will invest more budget into attracting customers from these platforms. 

Holiday Seasons

With the move to online shopping, the holiday season has been extended from just one day or one weekend to entire months. Consumers are shopping earlier and all year long. Retailers and other businesses can benefit by always having some kind of sale or promotion going on. 


Here are the key holidays for the fourth quarter:


  • Columbus Day
  • Halloween, the second most profitable holiday (Christmas is first)
  • Veterans Day
  • Thanksgiving Day
  • Black Friday
  • Small Business Saturday
  • Hanukkah 
  • Cyber Monday
  • Christmas Eve
  • Christmas Day
  • Boxing Day
  • Kwanzaa
  • New Year’s Eve


How does your business fare when it comes to a fully online shopping experience? Use these trends to boost sales growth in 2021 and beyond.   


Need help getting your business financials in order for 2022? Reach out to us today!

Our Latest Insight

Growth Impacts: Why This Relationship Breaks Down at $2M to $15M (And What It Costs You)

By Alisa McCabe • October 15, 2026
​There is a frustrating stage of growth when the business makes more money and becomes harder to run. You expected growth to create leverage. Instead, your calendar is fuller and decisions take longer. Projects compete for the same people. Expenses become harder to explain. Accounting needs more information from Operations. Operations needs more information from Accounting. And the accounting systems that carried you to $2 million were not built for $15 million. Nothing necessarily looks broken. That is what makes this stage so deceptive. The processes that got you here may still work. Your people may still be good. Your customers may still be buying. What changed is the weight your existing structure is being asked to carry. At $2 million, you can still personally compensate for the gaps. Somewhere on the road to $5 million, $10 million, or $15 million, that stops being possible. The business did not suddenly become dysfunctional. It outgrew its dependence on informal coordination.  Part 5 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship

Fixing It: How to Build the COO-Accounting Relationship Your Business Is Missing

By Alisa McCabe • October 12, 2026
If Article 3 felt a little too familiar, your first instinct may be to call a meeting. You tell Operations and Accounting they need to communicate better. That will not fix it. The five warning signs were never personality problems. They were signs that your accounting systems and routines were never intentionally built around how these two functions work together. People cannot follow a structure that does not exist. Accounting cannot inform decisions they do not know are being considered. Your COO cannot use financial information they cannot access in time. The fix is not complicated. That does not mean it happens naturally. Most of what you need to build will feel almost obvious. Recurring conversations. Clear handoffs. Shared definitions. Access to the right information. This is not glamorous work. That is probably one reason it gets overlooked. For the first few months, you may have to follow up constantly. People will forget. Meetings will get moved. Someone will make a decision and skip the handoff. Then something starts to change. The follow-up becomes unnecessary. Information moves without you. Problems get caught earlier. Eventually the results look effortless from the outside. They were not. You built the relationship that made them possible.  ​ Part 4 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship

Five Warning Signs Your COO and Accounting Aren’t Talking

By Alisa McCabe • September 28, 2026
Article 2 ended with a question. What would you actually see first if this relationship started breaking down inside your business? Here is the answer. You would see five things. If you are like most owners reading this, you are already looking at two or three of them. None of the five announces itself as a communication problem. Each one shows up as friction inside your accounting systems, wearing a perfectly reasonable disguise. That is the difficulty. On the surface, none of these looks like a broken relationship. Each looks like something else entirely. A busy month. A tough quarter. A personality difference between two people who were never going to be friends anyway. Every one of them gets explained away the first time you see it. That is exactly what makes them expensive. This article does not fix any of it. Article 4 does that. The job here is naming what is already sitting in front of you. Most owners walk past these signs for years without recognizing what they are looking at.  ​ Part 3 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship