Advisory services

We’re more than accountants

We’re here to make a real difference to you and your business. Delivering a high-quality, efficient compliance service is just part of that. 

Helping you develop, improve, and grow your business is the next step.

Our Business Development offerings are practical and tangible services to create long-term value for you and your business. 

Contact us today on 0161 832 1399 to arrange a complimentary meeting to discuss how we can help you.

LEAD GENERATION

Proactive Accounting Meeting

If you’re keen to improve your business performance and financial results but feel you’re not being supported enough by your current accountant – give us a call. 

We’ll arrange a complimentary Proactive Accounting Meeting to review your unique situation and discuss how we may be able to support you. During the meeting, we’ll identify your burning issues, opportunities, and potential tax efficiencies, then establish goals and strategies to achieve them. We’ll also have a strategic discussion about the current and future direction of your entities.

Following the meeting, if required, we’ll prepare a proposal for Business Development work and/or compliance services, with all costs priced upfront.

Annual Accounts Review

It’s essential to understand your Annual Accounts and taxation commitments. Devoting time to understanding your accounting reports is one of your first steps toward making better business decisions.

Every business owner should be able to read and understand their Annual Accounts. They tell an important story about your business. However, most business owners don’t have a background in accounting.

The good news is that we can help you develop your financial skills. It’s our job to empower you so you can run a better business.

Business Review

As a valued client, you’ll receive at least one Complimentary Business Review (CBR).  In fact, this is an annual event for a number of our clients.  

The CBR is an opportunity for you to set and review your goals and gives you clarity around the actions you need to take to achieve those goals.  It also stimulates strategic discussion and identifies burning issues, opportunities, and challenges so that you respond effectively.  

And of course, it’s an opportunity for our team to identify greater tax efficiencies and asset protection.

Cashflow & Profit Improvement Meeting

In business, a healthy profit isn’t enough. Even a profitable business can fail due to poor cashflow. 

We want to help you better manage your cashflow. The first step is to determine your business’s Cash Conversion Cycle. Then we can help you identify strategies to shorten the cycle – so you have more cash in your bank account.

Profit matters too. Increasing your profit can increase your cashflow. Implementing strategies to improve your cashflow and profit enables you to set up your business for success. 

The sooner you attend an Improvement Meeting, the sooner you can improve your profit and cashflow and increase your money in your bank.

ESSENTIAL SERVICES

Business Planning

A great Business Planning process gets to the heart and soul of your business. Upon completion of pre-work, we’ll have a greater understanding of your vision and values to facilitate a four-hour planning session to help you create a clear one-page Business Plan.  

The outcome of this process is to identify and prioritise goals (both short and long term), create strategies to achieve your goals, enable you to review actual performance against targets, and establish a 90 Day Action Plan to address immediate and critical issues.

Importantly, this process eliminates a factor that is too common in business – procrastination!

Annual Forecasting

Cash is the lifeblood of any business; even a profitable business can fail because of poor cashflow.

Every business should undertake an annual Cashflow Forecast to aid their planning and decision-making. We want you to be proactive in managing your cashflow – not assuming you only need one if the bank asks for it.

When you know how much money will be coming in and out of your business and when, you can confidently plan and execute desired growth and improvement strategies to achieve positive change.

Cashflow Management

Cashflow planning is the best practice in any business and critical to survival and growth. 

Our Cashflow Management service is designed to help you improve your Cash Conversion Cycle and maximise your cashflow. It will allow you to predict large cash outflows and respond to changes in your business. 

Managing cashflow is all about your business processes. We’ll conduct a thorough review of your processes to identify any potential causes of poor cashflow so we can treat the underlying issues.   

We’ll meet with you on a quarterly basis to monitor, analyse, and adjust your key cashflow drivers. Acting as your accountability coach, we’ll help you set annual goals and devise an action plan to ensure you implement improvement strategies for maximum results.

Management Reporting

If you’re not measuring your financial results and key drivers in your business, you can’t properly manage them or implement meaningful improvement strategies and achieve your business goals.

Your monthly Management Report will provide a snapshot of your results, ensuring you understand your financial position and have accurate and up-to-date information on which to base your decisions. Regularly monitoring your key drivers and financial results ensures you’re on track to achieve your goals.

We’ll start with an initial meeting to determine which drivers to measure and ensure you understand how to interpret your reports. Each month we’ll send you a report followed by a 15-minute momentum call to discuss your results, identify areas for improvement, and set actions to ensure you’re on track to achieve your goals.

Quarterly Coaching

As a business owner, you can sometimes feel alone and unsupported – spending little time working on your business and feeling trapped in the day-to-day pressures of working in your business. 

Our Quarterly Coaching service provides you with increased accountability and support, so you achieve the results you want from your business.

The outcomes include increased profitability and cashflow, customised reporting templates to measure actual performance against forecasts, and access to an expert sounding board to ensure you continue working towards your goals.

Monthly Coaching

Owning and operating a business is hard work. Our Monthly Coaching programme provides you with accountability and support to ensure you make the best decisions for you and your business. Together, we’ll work to develop strategies to achieve your desired outcomes and gain the lifestyle you want.

Whether your business needs guidance to navigate major change or you simply want regular contact with a trusted coach, we’d love to help!

Financial Awareness Coaching

We’ll help you to understand your business better, enabling you to better manage your cashflow. Good management decisions rely on a sound understanding of the financial implications for your business.  

This service involves meeting with us regularly to discuss your financial results, culminating in you learning to produce and interpret your own customised monthly financial reports.

KPI Improvement Coaching

The better you understand the key drivers in your business, the easier it will be to increase your profits and free up cashflow.

First, we’ll help you establish what your key drivers are. These may be financial (e.g. gross profit margin) or non-financial (e.g. customer satisfaction ratings). We’ll teach you how to measure each Key Performance Indicator and set improvement targets. When you’re confident measuring each KPI, we’ll provide regular coaching to help you implement a tactical plan focusing on the process and behavioural changes required to ensure improvement.

Investing a little time each week and making simple changes can dramatically improve your KPIs, thus positively impacting your business performance and personal life.

Virtual Planning for Success

Too often we hear business owners say they feel like a slave to their business. Your business is there to serve you, not the other way around. In our Virtual Planning for Success workshop programme, you’ll learn how to take control of your business, unlock your true potential, and achieve the results you want.

Each month, you’ll attend a two-hour virtual workshop in a highly supportive group format with non-competing businesses.  

During the workshops, you’ll learn how to minimise procrastination and stress, understand the little things you can do that will have the greatest impact, and learn best practice strategies. You’ll identify, define, and prioritise your key goals and be held accountable to achieving them – all while achieving sustainable business growth.

ADDITIONAL SERVICES

Core Values Development

Core Values are the essence of a company’s identity. They support the vision and shape the culture of an organisation. Creating Core Values for your business provides a great foundation and guide for how your team should interact with your clients and each other.

Attendees will complete pre-work to get thinking about their values and vision so that everyone is prepared to gain maximum benefit from the 4-hour session. We’ll then guide you through our structured process to create up to five Core Values with definitions that will underpin the expectations of behaviour within your organisation.

Core Values make leading and managing a team and client expectations much easier. When your team live and breathe your Core Values, you’re more likely to achieve your business goals. As Management Consultant and Educator Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

Effective Governance

Every business has a governance function, no matter how small. Effective Governance is the cornerstone to business success and longevity and all business owners and company directors understand governance best practice. 

Good governance is essential to add value and minimise risk and a Governance Plan is crucial to help reduce stress and increase your company’s value. We’ll help you develop a Governance Framework Plan and Governance Action Calendar, identifying significant opportunities and risks to be managed.

We’ll help you maximise shareholder value, achieve your strategic goals, and minimise risk in your company.

Organisational Review

Many businesses don’t have absolute clarity around their team’s defined roles and responsibilities. Often this results in business owners wearing too many ‘hats’, meaning precious little time to spend on business strategy or high-level activities that create real value for your business. 

An Organisational Review will help you to build a functional Organisation Chart, visually defining departments, functions, roles, and responsibilities. We’ll help you structure your business so it’s more sustainable, scalable, and ultimately, saleable.

10 Hats Workshop

For a business to run effectively and efficiently, there needs to be a clear Organisation Chart to define its departments, functions, roles, and responsibilities.

This workshop series consists of three half-day workshops with non-competing businesses, spread across three months. You’ll learn the principles and fundamentals of the Organisation Chart and build your first draft at the initial session. You’ll then build job descriptions for key roles and formulate a plan to roll out your new structure and maximise team performance. 

Marketing Plan

Every business should have a Marketing Plan. It’s essential to understand your marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and ensure continuous improvement. 

We want to help you create a 12-month activity-based Marketing Plan with clear goals and actions to generate more leads and improve customer retention. We’ll help you clarify your purpose, positioning, and unique selling point to target the right audience. 

Our goal is to provide clear direction and ensure you spend your marketing budget on the strategies and tactics that will deliver the best outcomes.  

Value Based Selling

Many business owners are very good at what they do but have never had formal sales training. Can you easily articulate the value of your product or service to your customers?

Designed to help you improve your sales processes, Values Based Selling helps you increase productivity, efficiency, and profit. It enables you to give price certainty, confidently handle changes in work scope, and eliminate fee surprises for you and your clients.

This coaching programme helps build your sales knowledge, focusing on powerful selling techniques, writing sales proposals, and defining your Terms of Trade. We’ll also help you create and implement an ongoing Sales Action Plan.

Value Based Selling encourages a return proportionate to the value you’re providing clients, freeing up time for you to concentrate on other revenue-generating activities.

Succession Planning

Succession Planning helps you clarify what you want for the future, considering business, personal, and family expectations, and defines the steps required to turn that vision into a reality.  At least 3-5 years is the ideal timeframe to make sustainable improvements – the more time you have for planning and implementation, the better.  

The half-day Succession Planning session provides an overview of important considerations, succession options, and processes relevant to your business. You’ll then define your succession timeline, identify your ideal succession scenario, and look at opportunities to improve your business value and vulnerabilities you need to manage, documenting them in a robust Succession Plan. 

We’ll then set quarterly and 12-month goals and actions. As a result, you’ll have a roadmap to guide decision-making and ensure your business is in the best position to achieve maximum return on your hard work and investment.