Now more than ever, organisations are faced with highly competitive and expanding marketplaces. As a business owner, it’s important to keep looking for ways to develop your organisation to ensure it reaches its full potential. By improving performance, and sustaining that improvement, you can ensure your financial and operational success in 2015 and beyond.
Morrows’ team of Business Advisors brings personal experiences of working with various types of organisations to help make change happen. This is done by helping you deliver measurable and sustainable improvement in the performance of your business by focusing on key areas such as business growth, profit and protection.
In our experience, we find that a structured process involving three meetings spaced throughout each financial year provide timely guidance to you and assist with a focus on the most appropriate strategies for the time of year. This table summarises the meetings and their purposes.
Specific meetings to discuss:
- Business Growth – Review prior year and first quarter results focusing on profitability, overall business performance and improvement opportunities
- Business Profit – Review half year results focusing business growth and balance sheet management
- Protection Review and Forward Planning – Review projected results for the remainder of the year and focusing on wealth protection issues, problems and opportunities identification including tax planning, asset protection and wealth management strategies
Meeting 1: Business Growth
Business growth rates will identify the health of your business. It is important for business owners to set growth targets over a period of time that are linked to your vision and to the market conditions. As a starting point to improve your business, growth begins with prioritising the areas for improvement and change. How do you identify these areas? We recommend you try the GPS Diagnostic tool on Morrows’ website which asks you to answer 25 simple questions about your business using a -5 to +5 scale. The tool then provides a short report noting your top three areas on which to focus. For the GPS Diagnostic Tool please click here.
Meeting 2: Business Profit
In Meeting 2, Morrows Business Advisors will work with you to identify ways to make your business more profitable which may involve decreasing costs or increasing sales revenue. On the costs side, we will help you assess your inventory, direct costs, indirect costs, and overheads to identify appropriate reduction strategies. For example, in a manufacturing firm, a waste audit (ie reviewing inefficiencies) is usually the first step, often yielding 15 to 20 per cent savings of operating costs.
Alternatively, increases in revenue may be achievable through pricing changes and considering whether you could increase prices without reducing sales. Revenue improvements may also be achieved through increased productivity of your staff, finding new customers, and offering value added services.
Meeting 3: Protection Review and Forward Planning
Whilst businesses strive for success, high levels of growth usually require significant amounts of working capital and cash flow. Business success also usually leads to higher levels of tax and exposure to an increased level of creditors and claims.
Meeting 3 with your Business Advisor will, therefore, cover protection. This means protection from competition, creditors, of your Intellectual Property (IP) and cash. It may also include protection from yourself and your personal spending or living requirements and some would also say protection from the tax man. In this meeting you can expect to consider the structuring of reinvestment, tax planning and asset protection strategies to ensure that the wealth that you create stays in your pocket.
The difference is significant at Morrows
Our advantage is in our approach – seamless advice across business and finance, which ensures you receive solutions to the challenges life presents to you. We promise convenience, security and peace of mind through coordinated and cohesive advice.
The Morrows team provides business advice, legal support, wealth management, superannuation and family office services all under one roof. We partner and support you through life’s challenges and give you the confidence and peace of mind to take advantage of the right opportunities for you.
Morrows Business Advisors, led by Paul Tucker – Head of Business Advice, are skilled in facilitating your decisions on how to tackle your key areas for improvement, relevant solutions for you and committing to realistic timeframes in which to achieve your goals.
Speak to Paul on 03 9690 5700 or your current Morrows contacts to get started.