While businesses commonly rely on their accountancy providers to help with tasks like annual accounts preparation, submitting accurate tax returns and managing ongoing requirements such as bookkeeping, an accountancy practice offering a comprehensive service can provide far more in-depth advisory and consultative services.
Astute analyses of business performance, evaluations of strengths and weaknesses and sector-specific advice can be transformative, where commercial entities draw on skilled financial guidance from accountants with years of expertise.
James Todd & Co, an accomplished firm of Chartered Accountants, explains how its Goals To Growth service works, how it benefits business clients, and how strategic growth planning adds significant value.
General Accountancy Support vs Business Growth Planning
The conventional services we provide as accountants are always sought-after, assisting businesses with complying with their mandatory filing and tax submission obligations and a variety of other areas like management accounts preparation and registered office services.
We often hear from clients who are unaware of the additional support on offer and whether they should be consulting a financial planner or another professional – but a talented accountancy team can provide comprehensive assistance in-house without businesses needing to seek support from multiple practices or service providers.
This approach is advantageous because a business can rely on its existing point of contact to manage all of the guidance and practical support it needs without needing to repeat information-sharing exercises or clarify why a particular decision – perhaps around a merger, investment or financing application – is pivotal to business success.
Strategic growth planning, as the name suggests, is bespoke to the organisation. It involves an assessment of various courses of action to identify opportunities or solutions to a problem, providing business owners and senior management with the oversight they need to make informed, confident decisions.
Illustrating the Added Benefit of Strategic Business Support
Performance appraisals are a straightforward example that demonstrates how standalone accountancy services and business guidance can work hand in hand.
As a standalone service, accounts preparation simply provides the business with a verified set of financial statements to file. However, adding an appraisal to the end of that process can uncover business-critical insights or comparisons that ensure decision-makers have clarity about how to progress.
That could include breaking down cost drivers, identifying metrics that indicate parts of the business that are out-performing all others, or tracking slowing demand for a particular product or service – allowing the company to make key decisions about which areas of production to focus on during the coming period.
Analysing year-end reports side by side can also be used to measure variables like gross and net margins and the contribution departments or areas of the organisation make to shareholder reserves – breaking these down in the most relevant way rather than regarding one set of company-wide figures as the only source of data.
The Goals To Growth Service Explained
Goals To Growth is a programme created in recognition of the level of demand for more tailored consultancy services to enable local businesses to achieve their potential.
Since then, it has become one of our most sought-after services, particularly with early-stage businesses keen to maximise their opportunities or for established firms that seem to have hit a plateau and struggle to work out how best to expand or diversify.
The exact process differs for every business but works on a three-step methodology to build towards a comprehensive strategy companies can roll out across their operations:
- Business objective setting: Owners establish businesses for myriad reasons. Unpicking what they hope to achieve and the outcomes that matter most is the first phase. That could mean looking at aspirations, setting goals, or breaking down big-picture aims into achievable steps.
- Progress measurement: Once you have a strategy in place, it acts as a road map to take you from your current position to where you’d like to be. Implementing smaller targets along the way ensures you can clearly measure progress made and introduce more focused initiatives as things move forward based on real-time financial analytics.
- Ongoing support: When a business starts moving in the right direction, we remain on hand, providing long-term assistance, assessments, and advice to retain that trajectory and pace, and can swiftly identify if any instances of spending, for example, are likely to take the business off target.
Most businesses begin with a one to five-year plan backed by mentoring, coaching and expert financial planning, allowing owners to concentrate on managing and running their businesses while relying on our assistance to keep working towards their overarching aims.
What to Expect From a Strategic Business Growth Planning Programme
One of the common issues many business owners share is that they have sole responsibility for making decisions while simultaneously trying to juggle the challenge of running their business, managing their workforce, complying with filing obligations and keeping on top of customer communications.
Even the most dedicated, passionate business owner may not have a background in financial management and often makes decisions based on instinct, accompanied by time pressures that don’t provide sufficient capacity to conduct research or carefully assess competing options.
Working with a strategic business advisor removes a great deal of stress – a business owner can request advice, access mentoring, or get in touch when they have a concern, issue or problem they aren’t sure how best to resolve.
The business advisory team at James Todd & Co covers all bases and draws on a wealth of knowledge spanning business risk management, short and long-term financial planning, cost analysis, budgeting and accurate forecasting to provide comprehensive support.
For more information about strategic business growth assistance or the benefits this may bring to your organisation, please get in touch at any time to learn more.
Published by: Holy Minoza
