Business 1

is involved in a professional services industry.

The owners of the business had a really good vision regarding what they wanted from the business. They felt there was an opportunity in the industry to create something different from the competition. The strongest vision was probably around how they wanted the organisation to be for staff, essentially they wanted to create an environment which was great to work in and brought the best out in people.

On their own admission they felt their biggest weakness was sales and marketing. Some money had been spent on a really clear and well designed website and there had been some early investment in a brand strategy. The brand strategy was aimed at defining the focus and positioning of the business in the market.

The first 12 months

It was a start-up business with very little revenue at first, so they were bootstrapping.

Financials – they took a fairly minimal approach to financial statements and documenting transactions. What they did do well was create a working budget which was updated as new expenses and clients became known. The owners had a good handle on the budget.

People – Even though they were boostrapping and saving where they could, they did employ an office assistant, their key duties were to deal with all correspondence but more  importantly to start an office manual and procedures manual, parts of which are still being used 4 years later.

Knowledge – they had a great technical knowledge as well as a good sense of where the market was heading in the industry. The key skills they were acquiring during the early phases were dealing with clients in a business development capacity rather than a technical capacity. This may sound strange but a lot of technical people start a business because they’re good at what they do but they don’t know how to sell themselves and deal with clients effectively.

Systems and delivery – as mentioned before, the admin person developed some early systems which held them in good stead for 2 to 3 years.

Sales and marketing – by their own admission this was an area of weakness in the business. The problem they faced was that they actually had no idea what these things were. In reality though they were doing some limited marketing via networking and the branding work which had been undertaken had given them a flatform to start from. Admittedly their sales techniques once the lead or prospect had come in were awful. The rationale or justification for being bad at sales was that they needed every dollar in door. About 3 years after starting they came to realise that the cost of this attitude was huge and significantly held back the business.

We will be charting the progress of three businesses. We will recap the progress so far; what they do, where they have come from and where they hope to be in the future.

The Cornerstones of business are;

• Financial (recording, reporting, using)
• People (staff)
• Knowledge and learning (what we know and need to know)
• Sales and Marketing (driving revenue)
• Systems and delivery of service (how well we do it)

And then after you have spent that money are you getting the best value from your accounts, do you get all the reports you need to drive strategy, cut costs, improve sales, improve productivity and so on?

A good CFO Service is a one stop shop to get all your accounting done, get better reports, and take the stress out of doing the accounts.

At Cornerstone Consulting we deliver all of these benefits as part of our CFO service and we also wrap all the tax and advisory services in as well.

The synergy you get as a client is that everything is taken care of and we as an advisor can also offer strategic help where it wasn’t possible before.

The beauty of all this from our experience is that it actually costs you less than what you have in place already. When we started this service we were surprised that a fully integrated CFO Service was going to cost less for out clients but we’ve proved it’s easy.

The key elements to being great at tax and therefore great for our clients are;

• A brain.
• Experience.
• Knowledge.
• Tenacity to get the best result.
• Ability to apply all the above to a problem.
• Communicate in simple language.
• Take the stress out of dealing with tax stuff.

For a local boutique firm, we help many clients with their R&D needs. We know from experience that our level of expertise when it comes to R&D rivals that (and arguably exceeds ) specialist and international firms R&D firms.

When coupled with our CFO Services we obtain even greater results for our clients.

Over the past 8 years, we have been offering Outsourced CFO services to our clients.

What we know about outsourcing the CFO or finance dept is that your business can enjoy some of the following benefits.

• Save money (by structuring the position you can save money and get much better results).
• Save time (we are very efficient at what we do).
• No staffing issues (we offer seamless staffing solutions via our team).
• Greater management reporting.
• Greater management of key areas of your business (debtors, stock and so on).
• Greater flexibility.
• No down time.