LONG ISLAND

If you attended yesterday’s International Association of Business Communicators lunch at The Inn at Fox Hollow in Woodbury, you likely would have walked away knowing what EBITDA stands for.  For non-accounting types who are brave enough to want to know, that’s “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.”

Louis DeMars, a CPA with offices in Williston Park and Manhattan, was brought in to demystify numberspeak, the basic terminology of financial statements and key economic indicators.  He also shed light on the three R’s:  ROE (return on equity) and ROA (return on assets) and ROI (return on investments).

Deborah Kendric, director of communications for State Bank of Long Island and planner of the event, said the group’s membership includes

 plenty of financially savvy people like her – she happens to be a CPA – but also some members who have asked for this grounding in underlying principles.  So DeMars’ mandate was to walk the fine line between being too general and too technical.

“We felt this was a great way to give people the basics,” says Kendric, “a general understanding of what they should look for when analyzing a business.”

It was that discussion, along

with a side-by-side comparison of financials from three media companies, that Leila Zogby says she found most helpful.  Regarding EBITDA, “I knew what the letters stand for, but he helped me put them into context,” says Zogby, owner of a corporate writing service in East Northport.

According to DeMars, 47, the key to explaining financial statements is to “start with the basic formula”:  Think of it as income (aka sales or revenue) minus cost (aka expenses) equals profit (aka net income).

From there, he builds up to that brontosaurus-sized EBITDA, which he says, at its barest bones, means simply, “revenue minus expenses with a few things added back in.”

DeMars says it’s also helpful to have empathy.  In his experience, some people just naturally “get” the principles of accounting – and others don’t.  He knows that feeling, as “chemistry was the subject I don’t understand,” so much so that when his kids need help with their chemistry homework, he sends them to the Internet.

More Management training

            In the training profession, there’s added emphasis this year on management training, leadership/executive development and diversity training.  Those findings come from a national survey of 2,556 human resources executives.

The survey, conducted last month online for the Novations Group, a Boston-based consulting firm, found that when it comes to spending and staff priorities in the coming year:

■ 42 percent of respondents said they’ll budget more for supervisor and management training.

■ 41 percent will budget more for leadership/executive development.

■ 26 percent will budget more for diversity/inclusion training.

■ And, despite what bosses say is the ongoing need for improved communications skills, only 19 percent of respondents expect to increase training resources in that area, and 12 percent expect to decrease resources.

The jump in management, leadership and diversity training jibes with what Linda Berke, president of the Long Island chapter of the American Society for Training and

development, has heard from informal polling of chapter members and sees in her own business.  She is president of Taylor Performance Solutions Inc. in Melville.

The emphasis on management training is due in part, she says, to the anticipated hand-off of the management baton from baby boomers to those in Generation X.  And much of today’s diversity training is rooted in the need for managers to understand how work styles and values differ among the four generations now in the workplace.

On Jan. 30 she’ll be speaking to the Long Island chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management on hiring, managing and training those in Generation Y, the newest entrants.

Berke says that employers are also focused on employee retention, as well as customer retention, and a better trained staff can help with both.

And she’s finding that trainers are at a more senior level these days and are having earlier input – in contrast to finding out about a project that “required training right when a project was being implemented.”