• Be open about your personal goals
  Income, time off, lifestyle, when or if you want to sell, your appetite for risk.
• Explain your constraints
  Family commitments, staff challenges, industries or types of work you don’t want to touch, your comfort level with debt.
• Together, we’ll translate those goals into concrete financial targets
  Revenue, margins, overhead levels, cash buffers and debt limits.

That way, we’re not just ‘doing the numbers’, we’re steering toward something that actually matters to you.

Our job is not only to report on the numbers, it is also to help you build a simple system so you can run the business by those numbers.

We can help you:

• Set up or clean up your accounting software so the data is reliable and timely.
• Design a chart of accounts that tells a story (separating revenue streams, direct costs and key overheads).
• Choose 5-10 key metrics we’ll track monthly. For example, gross margin by service line, average invoice size, debtor days and cash runway.
• Create a short monthly reporting pack
  One page of key numbers and one page of commentary and actions.

This converts raw transactions into a practical decision making tool.

4. Bring us in before big decisions
Some of the most expensive mistakes we see happen because we are made aware about a decision months after it’s been made.

Please involve us before you:

• Hire senior staff or significantly change your team structure.
• Sign a new lease, loan, finance agreement or major contract.
• Launch a new product or service, or enter a new market.
• Buy or sell a business or significant asset.
• Change your pricing model or how you charge clients.

Our job is to ask the hard questions about cash, risk, structure and tax so you don’t have to learn the hard way.

5. Be willing to pay for advice, not just forms

If you only ever want the base level compliance fee, you’ll only ever receive compliance.

To utilise us as advisors:

• Let’s agree on a clear scope (and price) for advisory
  Annual planning, quarterly performance reviews and a live forecast we update together.
• Think of the cost in two buckets
  The ‘must do’ compliance work and the ‘makes a difference’ advisory work.
• Judge the value over a year
  Tax legitimately saved, margin improvements, bad decisions avoided and cash crises that simply never happened.

The advisory side will be a positive cost/benefit.