Ep. 114 – Financial Flexibility: Mastering Cash Flow Management with Dr. Howard Polanski

“The interest rate doesn’t matter; it’s the changing of the balance of the debt that matters because if we can get to zero a lot faster, zero times anything is zero.” ~Dr. Howard Polanski

In this episode of the Investment Grade Practices Podcast, Dr. Victoria Peterson welcomes Dr. Howard Polanski, the CFO (Cash Flow Optimizer!) and founder of Financially Led. He specializes in helping small business owners optimize their cash flow.

They explore the intricacies of cash flow management, focusing on how to strategically use lines of credit to reduce debt payments and increase financial flexibility. Dr. Polanski shares practical examples and valuable insights on maintaining financial stability, preparing for economic uncertainties, and enhancing overall cash flow in dental practices.

As you listen to this episode, ask yourself the following:

• How am I currently managing my debt payments?
• Could my practice benefit from a more flexible financial strategy?
• Am I prepared for economic downturns or unexpected expenses?
• What steps can I take to improve my cash flow management?
  

 

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Transcript

Victoria Peterson: Welcome to another episode of Investment Grade Practices. You are in for a real treat today. I’m Victoria Peterson, your host, and I am joined by our friend, Dr. Howard Polanski. Howard, welcome.

Dr. Howard Polanski: Thank you, Victoria. It’s great to chat with you at not a PDA conference.

Victoria Peterson: Yeah, that’s, we usually see each other twice a year there. Thank you for your support of our doctors. If you’re just tuning in for the first time and you don’t know Dr. Polanski, his company is called Financially Led and he calls himself as CFO, which means cash flow optimizer. So this has nothing to do with being in finance or value of your practice. It has to do with how money moves through your business, how money moves through your life and I’m super excited for the topic today. Howard, we were having a great conversation recently about one of your clients that you helped understand just that thing how money moves through your balance sheet and pays off debt and how you can free up some of that cash. Can you walk me through that scenario just a little bit?

Dr. Howard Polanski: Yeah, for sure. So this was a few months in the making and I got the dentist on board, got the husband on board, the people that weren’t on board were the CPA and the bookkeeper and so we finally had the conversation with them. The CPA was being the good cop. The bookkeeper was being the bad cop on all this and so the highlights were there was a half a million dollars left on a practice note and Victoria, that practice note was costing 20,000 a month. So we had about call it 27, 28 months left to pay this off and I’m trying to explain to the accountant and the bookkeeper in terms of what I do and say, “Look, we have this set up that we can move that loan away from the fixed debt and month one, get this down to a 4,000 payment,” and of course, the question is “How you do that?” And I was like, well, it’s about utilizing lines of credit in a strategic and efficient way, but they’re just like, “But now you’re moving this in a different way,” and I was like, “Look, I don’t care about that. What we’re trying to do is just free up the cashflow. Like who wants a 20,000 monthly payment that they have to worry about every single month?” No one does. Okay and so finally the bookkeeper was just like, “Well, she could have just taken the profit that she had and pay that against the loan,” and I was like, “Great. What was the profit? 120,000 this past year. Wonderful. We put the 120,000 against the loan, that lowers it to 380,000,” and Victoria, what will be the payment the next month?

Victoria Peterson: 20,000.

Dr. Howard Polanski: Exactly. 

Victoria Peterson: If it’s on a fixed loan.

Dr. Howard Polanski: Right. Which this was, and so I was like, “How does this help the dentist because now we just lost all of our liquidity, and we still have a 20,000 payment next month and so I ask you both, which is easier to pay 20,000. Four or 20?” And the CPA being the good cop is like, “Well, four.” I’m like, “Exactly. So what’s difficult to understand here?”

Victoria Peterson: Let me pause right here cause I want to jump in for you because what you’re talking about is a very little known strategy in finance and so I appreciate you because you are a way show where you’re out there with a machete cutting through the bush. talking about these financial tools that aren’t typical or top of mind for small business owners. So you hit on a key point to this strategy. It’s the structure of the note. It’s the structure of the loan. So the first question you ask is, “What are your fixed payment over time loans?” So I have 500,000 over 10 years at a 2 percent rate, right and Every dentist I talk to says “It’s all right.” I’m in year seven, seven more years. I’ll get out of debt. I’ll keep paying this 20, but it’s 2%. So I don’t want to refinance. I don’t want to get rid of that. The second type of loan is a variable rate loan where you pay interest only, or you pay a principal and interest based on the daily balance. So is that what you’re talking about here? Just switching out of that fixed, can’t do anything about it until it’s paid off environment into a more flexible paying on the daily rate

Dr. Howard Polanski: That is correct in the second or the latter way that you were describing is something called the line of credit which is just an open ended tool that money can move in and out Whereas with your traditional fixed payment, you can make extra payments, but that fixed payment is fixed. It’s fixed the next month and so once you make that extra payment, it’s locked up, it’s gone. You can’t get it again and to address one other thing, Victoria is that at this stage for that dentist, I don’t care what the interest rate was, think of the debt as a potential investment and here’s what I mean. If someone came to you and said, “Hey, Victoria, I’ve got this 500,000 investment, but guaranteed for as long as you own the asset, your cash flow is going to be free and clear 16 to 20,000 a month. Are you intrigued?”

Victoria Peterson: Ah, I see what you did there.

Dr. Howard Polanski: Yes, because it because what ends up happening is, is that it when you figure out the calculation I free up 200,000 a year on a 500,000 investment that’s a 40 cash on cash return Find me another investment that’s going to get you 40 percent cash on cash. That’s the question that people are not asking themselves when they say, “But I got my car at 0.99 percent interest.” I don’t care what’s the payment to satisfy the debt.

Victoria Peterson: So tell me how we do this. How do I shift 500,000 out of a fixed loan into a line of credit and lower that daily balance or lower it to 4000 versus 20. How do I pay that down? What does that look like? 

Dr. Howard Polanski: That’s a good question. So it’s not exactly the situation, but let’s just pretend that she got a 500,000 business line of credit to make this easy when that collections comes in every day, you have one of three spots for that money to hit, you can keep it in the checking account, you can transfer it into a savings account, or now you have a third option, you can move it into the line of credit because the line of credit’s an open ended tool. So every day, the money is not sitting in the checking account. If there is a balance, you sweep it everyday into the line of credit to lower the overall debt and when you lower the debt, you’re lowering the amount of interest that you have to pay but in this case, every two weeks, you’ve got payroll or credit card or rent or a business or mortgage or whatever it is. And so you take the money out to pay the expenses yet the surplus stays inside the line of credit and so you’re just chopping away every single day and for this particular case, we would be done in about eight to nine months instead of 27. So not only are we lowering the payment that we have to make each month, because the only thing you have to pay is just the interest. We’re also cutting down the time by one half to one third of the time remaining that she had, but the most important thing to me, Victoria, is that she now has flexibility. If there’s a slowdown in her practice, if there’s another change healthcare crisis where people can’t get paid now, there’s flexibility built in.

Victoria Peterson: Okay. So let me make sure I really want to simplify this and if I’m saying it wrong help me out here. So I have a 5,000 debt, it sits in an account, a line of credit that I can pull money out of. Let’s say my line of credit is 600,000, but I’ve used 500, right? So I could still pull on it in the case of emergency. So lines of credit, business lines of credit are a great thing. So if there’s an opportunity and you want to expand, it’s there. If there’s a crisis and you need it, it’s there. So I’ve got a 600,000 line of credit, I used 500,000 to pay off that fixed loan and now I can also, so that’s how I pull money out but people don’t know they can put money in. I think that’s the magic trick right here is you put all of your practice revenue or a good chunk of it. You still keep day to day cash flow in your operating checking account, right? You don’t take it down to zero, but you take all your excess cash. So now it goes from 500 and this week we collected 25,000, so it goes to 475,000, next week it goes to 450,000, then we make payroll, it goes back up to 465,000, then it goes down to 440,000, 420,000, etc. I should have used round numbers and then we pay some bills and it goes back up by 50,000. So it’s just going to kind of go up and down, but it’s always ratcheting down because that money, that 10,000 a month, you talked about having 120,000 in profit at the end of the year to just chunk into this debt, it just ratchets down the debt. Am I getting that kind of right? So you’re, using all of your money. So instead, I could have taken that money, put it in my savings account and gotten 2%, 3%, 4%, maybe some are even doing 5%, or I could leave it here and you’re saying I’m getting 40% cash on cash return?

Dr. Howard Polanski: Correct. Yeah. So I mean like, even if it was 200,000 in a savings account at 5%, that’s $10,000 of interest earned in a year, and that’s taxable and here, what I’m saying is, is like, “No, throw it against the debt and I guarantee you the payments are going to be going down more than 10,000 in a year.”

Victoria Peterson: Right. So tell me this, you talked about tax a little bit. So if I do, whenever I pay off a fixed loan, there’s no tax advantage to that, right? Like, only interest is deductible on your tax return, not the principal payments? 

Dr. Howard Polanski: And that is accurate. Yeah and so going back to this example, just to kind of sum it all up, because it was the bookkeeper that brought this up. It’s like, but we’re going to lose the tax deduction.

Victoria Peterson: On the interest.

Dr. Howard Polanski: On the interest, not on the principal payment, but on the interest. so he asked us like, “Well, how much of an increase in taxes is this dentist going to have?” And she was thinking off the top of her head. She’s like, “I think about 15,000,” and it was the dentist that said, “So let me understand this. I might pay 15,000 more in taxes, but I’m going to free up nearly 200,000 in a year in cashflow, what’s wrong with this scenario?” And the CPA could say nothing, the bookkeeper could say nothing because you don’t live your life off the balance sheet. You live your life off of the cash flow in the business or the cash flow in your personal life and so all I’m trying to do is just free up money from fixed debt payments. So now you have more flexibility in case there’s a slowdown, in case you want to grow, in case you want to invest someone somewhere else. The money is now there and it’s available.

Victoria Peterson: So let’s say that over the course of 10 months, I ratcheted down my debt. What I still have is a 600,000 line of credit and I’ve got zero payment. So I freed up 20,000 a month in cash flow. That’s still coming to my net profit. I can take that. I don’t have to now apply it to the loan, I can go buy a Ferrari. I can do whatever the heck I want to with it. Right? So I freed it up. I preserved my line of credit for future. Opportunities or that dreaded phone call when the CPA says, “Hey, you did this strategy, you freed up cashflow, you grew your practice, but you owe 50,000 in taxes. Big whoop. You got a line of credit. You pay your taxes and you deploy that strategy again, wipe out the tax bill pretty quickly.” So it feels like this is a really nice tool where it’s appropriate. It’s a really nice tool to help even out that roller coaster, you know, like you have a big month and then the next month you drop, but all the lab bills from the previous month come in and so it also sound you didn’t say this directly, but one, you got to get off that roller coaster but two, if you’re on the roller coaster, you could use these lines of credits to lower your debt payment, free up your cash flow and whether those little, I call it like the EKG, you know, those little ups and downs of your businesses day to day, just a little more sanely.

Dr. Howard Polanski: Exactly.

Victoria Peterson: Wow, Howard. I think you, you explain this. I’ve talked to you like, five dozen times about the subject. This feels more clear and simple for me as a consumer or business person than it ever has and I thank you for that so much. This is really terrific and if I had to summarize. I love the example that you brought, because what I heard was, just by understanding how money flows through, meaning money comes in, I’ve got day to day bills to pay, I’ve got debt to pay. The debt doesn’t show up on the day to day bills that’s why you look at your profit and loss and you’re like, wow, I should have 50,000 in the bank, but I have 10,000 because I have these 30,000 in debt that I’m paying and that, that shows up on balance sheet. So you really help to explain money flow, not just through the overhead on the P&L, but it’s that balance sheet overhead. It’s that balance sheet loans. That was really cool to see how the cash flows that and switching from fixed loans to variable loans, lines of credit, we can protect the business from any risk of downturn economy, any unexpected taxes, any unexpected ups and downs in the business and it sounds like in this particular case, it really balanced out interest. Like I don’t have to worry. Is it 2%? Is it 8%? Is it 25%? I mean, there’s a point in time it would make a difference but it balanced interest debt and taxes for this particular business.

Dr. Howard Polanski: And for most people, hold on to that interest rate for dear life and when I finally get to talk to someone and I just tell you the interest rate doesn’t matter, it’s the changing of the balance of the debt, the interest rate is applied to that matters because if we can get to zero a lot faster, zero times anything is zero.

Victoria Peterson: I love it. Well, thank you for taking this conversation from zero to hero. I love it. Howard, you’re just a master at it.

Dr. Howard Polanski: I appreciate the time, Victoria. Thank you.

Victoria Peterson: Oh, you’re welcome. This was 100 percent educational today. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. If our listeners want to get a hold of you, what’s the best way to connect and, see if this might be something that would work in their practice?

Dr. Howard Polanski: Well, number one, come to a Productive Dentist Academy seminar or workshop. but number two is www.financiallyled.com. My contact info is there. My masterclass is there. My ebook is there, but yeah, I’m not hard to find these days.

Victoria Peterson: All right. Well, thank you for all of those free resources. I’ll make sure that we get those in the show notes. Howard, I wish you well, and we will see you in September at our 20th annual reunion, our 20th anniversary celebration, our productivity workshop. Gosh, we probably met. I don’t know, 12, 15 years ago.

Dr. Howard Polanski: I think it was about 12 years ago now. Yeah.

Victoria Peterson: Yeah. Thanks for being alumni. It’s been amazing to watch your evolution in dentistry and all that you’ve contributed. Thanks for being here today.

Dr. Howard Polanski: Thank you so much.