Additional Thoughts
Let’s start at the beginning
Operating a business of any meaningful size today is, in truth, a complicated, daunting and most often less than glamourous task. And it can be fraught with potential problems – and opportunities.
Poor Financial Controls mean trouble
In our experience, a lack of, or poor financial organization, controls, systems and reporting is the largest single one source of business trouble and failure. This is not to be the threatening. Bur rather to state a fact we all have to deal with. There is a lot of waterfront to cover – and one critical; mistake can cost a lot.
Knowledge is Power
As the authors of the McGraw Hill’s Finance for Non-Finance Managers tell us:
“Finance is the language of business…”
At the end of the day everyone in a business needs to be speaking that language – at least a little…
Smaller is not necessarily easier – or less complicated
The ideas and discipline we share with clients apply as much to a $5 million annual business seeking to grow – as they do to billion dollar multinational organizations. (We have worked in each.) Each item raises its head regularly – perhaps with a different number of zeros – but it is there for reckoning nonetheless.
You need a Team
As to staff, you need more than just the key backbone players – CFO, Controller, etc. Your business needs to build a Finance team – a team that has been trained in the skills and tasks that allow the functions listed above to get done – predictably, smoothly.
Clear is Kind
We believe that clarity and transparency, even if it means hard truth telling, is a key virtue.
And an essential to a successful business…
Learning and Training are Key
In working through our solutions, we help clients and their staff learn and apply financial and business management disciplines to help their business succeed. Therefore, our work with you will be as much about training as it is about advising. We want you and your staff, augmented if it needs to be, to learn what they need to know. To move ahead with minimal ongoing help from outside. That is our self-help solution.
Finding staff members
We think that our range of education as well as Fortune 500 and middle market business experience, including working together in the CFO – Controller team role, makes us uniquely qualified to help you identify bona fide staff requirements. As well as find and fill any hole you have in Finance – promptly.