What Are Business Advisory Services?
Written by: Adam Ramage | Accounting Team
With over 60 years of helping our clients and local community with their taxation needs, everybody knows that at Canny Accounting, we do a lot of tax returns. It’s in our DNA, and it all started with Stan Canny back in 1960, but tax returns are not all that we do.
Business Advisory Services – In a nutshell!
Professional services for you that can help your business thrive!
If you google Business Advisory Services, you could quickly become both overwhelmed and confused.
- What are Business Advisory Services?
- How can such services help me and my business?
- How do I explain to an accountant that I need more than just my tax return filled out – I need help?
We at Canny Accounting are here to explain and to be your backbone. We love helping business owners, and we have worked hard developing our range of services, which utilise our experience and knowledge combined with our technical and tax skills.
Our business advisors have years of experience, and the chances are, if you have an issue, it will not be the first time our advisors have seen it. Business Advisory Services are designed to help you through the range of issues that you, as a business owner, must deal with. This could be a daily problem or a once-off event.
Some of the benefits of having a good business advisor will be that you have someone you can share an issue or problem with, someone that you can trust to give you tough love on occasion and give you support when that is what you need. A good business advisor will listen, and then will ask you questions that may make you think differently.
A lot of our advisory work is built around coaching, and sometimes, a coach may not have all the answers, but they will support you to seek the answer because we understand that you know your business better than we do.
Thinking of setting up your own business? Check out this blog we recently put together to take you through the steps: Setting Up a Business: An (Accounting) Checklist.
What Is a Business Advisor?
You may think that all tax accountants are business advisors, or you may wonder why you would go to your accountant for business performance advice.
Certainly, not all tax accountants are business advisors. So, what is a business advisor? A business advisor is someone who provides advice to businesses. Yep, that does not explain much.
So, let me talk about the team of business advisors at Canny Group. They are:
- Business owners;
- Employers;
- Qualified accounting and tax professionals;
- Colleagues;
- Charity board members;
- System specialists;
- Parents; and more!
All of us have years of experience providing insights to others, and we understand how a great business is run (and what to watch out for). A business advisor will seek to first understand your business before offering services to you.
What Services Can a Business Advisor Provide?
Our business advisory services are sometimes ad-hoc that come about simply from having a conversation with a client. But what we consider our most valuable service offerings are more structured, pointed services. We want our clients to understand these services, and we want them to fit in well with their goals and objectives.
We have a specific service around developing an annual business plan with you.
This is a great example of how we work with you, helping you identify goals, and then breaking those goals down into specific actions. The outcome of the annual business plan is you have a roadmap for the year ahead with actions and accountabilities to help you achieve your definition of success.
Another service we offer includes regular coaching, either monthly or quarterly.
Coaching involves us guiding you through your life as a business owner, whether that involves helping you through a tricky situation or checking in with you through normal operations. We tailor our coaching to your needs but provide the tough love when needed to keep you on track. Let accountability be your friend.
Coaching also works brilliantly with the annual business plan to help our clients stay on track with their goals. It stops your annual business plan from turning into a great big list of forgotten ideas and goals.
Every business should have a forecast, and our business advisory team can work with you to develop a budget or a forecast that aligns with your goals, helps identify risks and opportunities and is a financial version of your business roadmap.
Other services we offer can focus on specific areas of your business. For example – improving cash flow (and not just by cutting expenses), reviewing your breakeven point (and helping you understand the “levers” you can pull to impact this) and profit improvement through building your margin and optimising overheads.
And yes, the part of our advisory services we call “knowing your numbers” is designed to make your accounting reports make sense, become a usable management tool, and tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.
Finally (we list this last, so you don’t think this is all we want you to know we do), we offer services that are focused on growing your business. Growing leads, improving conversion rates, growing customer numbers, growing repeat customers, and even growing the margin you earn on sales.
And don’t be scared by the jargon – we work with our clients, so they understand the impact of each of these areas!
The Benefits of Having a Good Business Advisor
A good business advisor will provide you with an experienced perspective from outside of your business.
They will seek to understand your goals, and then look for ways to help you achieve them. That really is the benefit of a good business advisor. Their focus will be on helping you achieve your goals in meaningful, manageable steps.
What to Look for in a Good Business Advisor
If you think business advisory sounds like something you want, then how do you pick a good business advisor?
A good advisor will want to know about you and your business. They will be always asking questions before providing advice because a good business advisor will recognise that you know more about your business than they possibly could.
Look for someone who will listen, someone who is willing to challenge you, give tough love when you need it, and yet be there to support you when you need it, too.
It can appear difficult to pick from a multitude of web pages, so ask your business advisor if there is something they have which you can try before engaging in a full-blown service. Then you get the chance to choose having something tangible to judge by.
Canny Accounting + How Our Business Advisory Services Help
Our business advisors may be accountants first, but we use that base to offer you services that are designed to improve the performance of your business and help you achieve your business goals. Your business should work in a way that enhances your lifestyle and provides the income and time that you want.
The thought of working on your business plan may not sound inviting, but if this is a stepping-stone to better margins, improved cash flow, less debt, and increased profitability, you may find that sounds more appealing.
Often, your interaction with your accountant is only looking at the year past, or it may only be looking at the tax side of your business. That may be all you think you want. But if you are willing to talk about your business and what your goals are, our Business Advisory Services are future-focused, and you can be sure we are here to support you.
Get in touch if you would like to talk to one of our Business Advisory Team!
