Positive Cash Flow: Powerful Tools and Techniques to Collect Your Receivables, Manage Your Payables, and Fuel Your Growth

This book doesn't have much of an introduction or conclusion--or any real narrative flow, either. But it does have a healthy obsession with numbers: cutting your costs, boosting your profits and making a go of your business in tough economic times. And that's enough to make it a valuable resource. Cooke takes the old dot-com era philosophy (that profits don't matter all that much) and calmly chops it to bits. Business is all about profit, after all, and Cooke breaks down every possible facet of making one. As a result, he takes on more issues than he can really handle in one book, from inventory-stocking to workforce-reducing to phone bill-trimming. He even suggests what you could do with the resulting cash, like stock buybacks. It's certainly ambitious, but a tad too much to chew on, and the explanatory anecdotes feel too forced in their humor. But after years of corporations fudging numbers, a nuts-and-bolts guide to running the financial end of your business has a quaint and refreshing directness to it.