- Format
- Defined pieces of work, not a retainer by default
- Needs
- Reliable numbers to work from
- Not
- Legal advice or investment advice
Advisory, for the decisions that are not filings
Cash flow, pricing, hiring, owner compensation and structure. The conversations that change what the numbers say next year rather than describing what they said last year.
- Typical trigger
- A hire, a price change, a partner, a bad cash month, or an exit in mind
Most owners have plenty of data and nobody to argue with about it.
Bookkeeping tells you what happened. Tax work tells you what it costs. Neither tells you whether to raise your prices, whether the second hire is affordable, or why a business that grew forty percent has less cash than it did last year.
Those questions are usually answered alone, late, and with a rule of thumb from somewhere on the internet. They are much better answered by someone who can see the actual numbers and is willing to disagree with you.
We keep this deliberately unglamorous. No frameworks, no dashboards nobody opens. A question, the relevant figures, a recommendation and the reasoning behind it, in writing, so you can act on it or reject it for reasons of your own.
What people actually ask.
The questions clients actually bring us
- Can I afford to hire, and what does the first month of that person actually cost once payroll taxes are in?
- Am I making money on this client, or does the time we spend erase the margin?
- Should I take a salary or a distribution this quarter, and what does each do to my tax position?
- The business grew and the cash did not. Where has it gone?
- I am being offered a partnership. What should I be asking before I say yes?
- Is the structure I set up two years ago still the right one, or has the business outgrown it?
- I want to sell in three years. What should I start doing differently now so the accounts support the price?
- Before
- We read the numbers
- During
- A real conversation, not a presentation
- After
- A written recommendation with the reasoning
What an engagement actually looks like.
It starts with a question and some numbers, usually the last twelve months and whatever is happening right now. We read them before the call rather than during it, because an hour spent watching somebody open a spreadsheet is an hour wasted.
Then a conversation, which is where most of the value is. Half of what we do at this stage is ask what is behind the question, because the question people bring is frequently a proxy for a different one. Can I afford to hire usually turns out to be about whether the current pricing survives another year. Should I take a distribution is often about whether the business is actually profitable or just liquid.
Then something written. A recommendation, the reasoning, the numbers behind it, and what we would expect to happen if you do it. In writing, because advice delivered only in conversation gets remembered as whatever the listener already wanted to do.
- The presenting question
- Why is cash tight in a record year
- The actual answer
- Terms drifted and growth was self funding
An example of the kind of thing this catches.
A design studio came to us because cash was tight despite a record year. Revenue was up around forty percent and the bank balance had gone the other way. The owner assumed it was a collections problem and was preparing to chase clients harder.
It was not collections. Payment terms had drifted from fourteen days to thirty on new contracts, one large client had negotiated forty five, and headcount had been added in anticipation of work that had not yet been invoiced. Every one of those decisions was defensible on its own. Together they had moved about six weeks of revenue out of the current period, and the growth was funding itself out of the owner's cash.
Nothing about that needed a framework. It needed somebody to read the receivables ageing next to the payroll run and say the two things out loud in the same sentence. The fix was a deposit structure on new work and a conversation with one client, not a cost cutting exercise.
This is a composite drawn from a pattern we see regularly rather than a single client, and no identifying details are real.
Common questions
Usually not. Most advisory work is a defined piece of work with a question at the start and an answer at the end. Some clients keep a small monthly allowance so that the question does not have to be big enough to justify a quote, which suits businesses in a period of change.
It helps a great deal, because good advice needs reliable numbers. If your records are elsewhere we will look at them first and tell you honestly whether they are solid enough to draw conclusions from.
No to both. We are not a law firm and we are not licensed investment advisers, and we would rather say so plainly than blur the line. We work alongside your lawyer when there is one and will tell you when you need one.
Related
Got a decision you keep putting off?
Bring the question and the numbers. We will tell you what we would do and why.