Asset Availability

  

Categories: Investing

You bought an industrial peanut desheller. Paid $10 million for it. But you skrimped on maintenance. So now it's off an eighth of an inch and well, basically, peanut butter is clogging the machine, so you have to take it down for cleaning every other week.

Not only does taking that asset offline cost you time and money, it has made your vendors start to question your reliability in delivering the 10,000 pounds of peanuts you've been selling them for years. So your brand is getting tarnished and bad things are on the horizon for the future of Tortugaville.

If you spend big capital on an asset, the financial story rarely ends there...bad managers don't make accommodation for the needed maintenance, care, love, and feeding that big beast machines always seem to need.

There should be easy math that covers something like, "If I spend $10,000 a month on maintenance, then the machine should be up and working 4 more days a month - are those 4 days worth $2,500 in profitable throughput to the company?" If the answer is "yes" or something even close to "yes" then...yeah, go for it.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is Liquidity?64 Views

00:03

Finance a la shmoop what is liquidity all right liquidity is

00:09

not this but liquidity is this alright liquidity or being liquid is the ability [A pool of water]

00:17

to pay for things with cash and in some parts of the world

00:21

moose pelts most pelts get your moose belt here five for a dollar you might own 4,000 acres of [Man wearing a hat stood by his land]

00:27

land in Alaska most your neighbors are well

00:30

moose but when you go into your local Ford dealer to buy a Ford f-150 with the

00:34

pimped-out tires and the intentionally off-road package the dealer wants to be [Man purchasing a Ford F150]

00:38

paid in cash not in Moose pelts. if you sold those pelts for cash and then paid

00:44

him and then you'd be liquid like the rest of the moose well in the real world [A table full of moose juice]

00:48

liquid things are stuff like stocks and publicly traded bonds and anything you

00:53

can find on eBay that'll turn into cash in less than a week or so original [Website showing Barbie doll and car for sale]

00:57

edition of Avengers comic yeah the one where Iron Man and Captain America share

01:01

their first kiss and that that one's as good as sold now on the flip side of the [Coin flipped]

01:05

coin long term investments like funding two kids in a garage who are building a

01:09

search algorithm with likely 10 years or more before an IPO [Kids using a computer in a garage]

01:12

yeah those investments are highly illiquid as in the opposite of cash

01:18

immediately on hand because there are rarely any other buyers of the private [Man playing the piano to a crowd]

01:22

company shares you bought when you invested in them at least not buyers for

01:25

a long illiquid time meaning that most people simply won't give you cash for

01:29

shares in a company with no profits little don't know revenues or even no [Graph of profits and revenue for a company]

01:33

website. So is your home liquid? err not so much but you can borrow against

01:39

it liquidly in other words sometimes

01:41

illiquid things can allow you to have liquidity you know like if you have a [Man stood by a home holding a mortgage paper]

01:46

mortgage of say a hundred grand on a home that's probably worth well over

01:49

half a million bucks then any bank will most likely let you borrow a couple

01:54

hundred grand pretty much at any time you want [Man borrowing home owner more money]

01:56

if you pledged the home as collateral in other words if you don't pay the bank

02:00

back they're going to start parking in your garage and pickin out drapes for [Car reversing into garage]

02:04

the living room as they repossess it to pay off the money you borrowed from them [Bank man repossessing the home]

02:08

promising to pay it back well fortunately this isn't a chemistry course so

02:12

there's no need to learn about the solidity and gas-idity[Examples of solids and gas]

02:15

Up Next

Finance: What is working capital?
268 Views

A company’s ability to cover its short-term debts with its current liquid assets, which can be cash, inventory, and accounts receivables, is desc...

Finance: What is Capital Expenditure, i.e. Capex?
56 Views

What is capital expenditure (CAPEX)? Capital expenditure refers to the money that is used to buy or fix the physical parts of a business like land,...

Finance: What is Brand Equity?
3 Views

What is Brand Equity? Brand Equity refers to the added or subtracted value that name recognition may accord to a company’s products and services....

Finance: What is a Liquid Market?
17 Views

A liquid market is a market featuring high trading volumes, i.e. investors actually want to put their cash to work.

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)