Your personal & professional goals are central to our business advisory services.
We take the time to get to know you better so we can offer straight talking, practical advice and solutions to allow you to address the challenges your business faces and assist you to grow and increase its profitability
Business Planning, Budgets & Forecasts
We can challenge & support you in the presentation & drafting of your business plan, assist with your costings, cashflows & forecasts and provide you with tools to enable you to critically analyse your idea and marketplace.
A business plan sets out your idea, analyses this in the context of competition within your market, considers how your unique selling points set you apart, determines your strategic goals and objectives and sets out the resources required to achieve them. Whilst this should be a dynamic document, revised as the business evolves and market changes, day-to-day issues can get in the way of strategic planning. We can also assist you to review your existing plan to support your long-term objectives and ensure success.
If financing is required, funding providers will want to see a business plan. Provision of finance – and its cost – will be based on their assessment of the risk associated with their investment in your business. A credible and professional business plan, with reasoned strategy and solid financial forecasts can assist providers in understand your idea & business – as well as reassure them that you have yourself taken due account of the risks associated with your idea and the market in which you operate.
We can also use our technical expertise and understanding of your business to help prepare robust & realistic operational budgets enabling you to set cash flow and profit requirements and providing a benchmark against which you can measure your actual results.,
Business Start Ups & Incorporation
We can also assist you when you start up your business with:
- Advice on the most suitable structure for your business and the benefits or risks associated with incorporation in your own unique situation
- Company Formation
- Advice regarding compliance with the Companies Act and other regulations
- Setting up your PAYE scheme and registering the company for VAT & Corporation Tax with HMRC.
Management Consultancy
With more than 25 years’ experience working in senior financial roles, specifically within business operations in sales & marketing and distribution, we are well placed to provide you with a range of management consultancy services. These can help you to diagnose & address specific problem areas & issues within your business in a cost-effective manner without the need to retain a full-time finance professional within your team. Our team has undertaken formal PRINCE2 project management training to practitioner level and undertaken ITIL process documentation for FTSE100 companies
We can support you with detailed analysis and solutions to your specific questions:
- Market, Debtors & Revenues - Examples: Where am I in my product life cycle?; How effective are my sales channels?; Do my incentives & discounts work?; Am I optimising prices to obtain the maximum contribution from products?; Who are my most profitable customers or customer types?; Am I over-exposed to one product or customer?
- Creditors & Costs – Examples: How sensitive is my profitability to changes in my cost base?; Is an overspend volume or price driven?; Where can I cut costs?; How effective is my marketing expenditure?
- Manpower – Examples: Are there issues with employee turnover or absenteeism?; Can journey cycles or sales territories be optimised?; How much employee time is chargeable and has this changed?; What controls do I have over recruitment processes or employee incurred expenses?; Are incentive schemes effective?
- Investment Appraisal – Examples: How long will it take to payback the investment?; Which opportunity is the most profitable?; Should I lease or purchase?; Should I invest in a company vehicle?
- Balance Sheet – Examples: Are operations sensitive to asset unavailability?; Am I overstocking on some product lines?; Are debtors paying to terms?; Do I have sufficient liquid cash balances to pay my suppliers on time?; Can I renegotiate supplier credit limits and payment terms?
Or we can assist with general appraisals of your business environment. We can:
- Review your business processes and internal control environment.
- Recommend improvements or implementation of control procedures to mitigate losses, save costs & safeguard assets
- Streamline processes or identify unnecessary steps
- Document procedures to reduce the amount of time required to effectively train and support your team
Other Services
We can also provide training & mentoring support to assist you in understanding your accounts or to assist in implementing new processes & procedures.