Our Services

In these tough economic times your virtual CFO will provide you with the valuable insight you need to navigate your way to success.

Most SME’s cannot or will not afford the salary of an expensive full time CFO, but now, through Virtual CFO, you can take advantage of a level of expertise previously unavailable. Whether it be capital raising, restructuring, exit and succession or just plain good old fashioned advice, our advisors are the best in the business, ready to assist you in any way. Let us work with your staff whether its your bookkeeper, accountant, operations manager (etc) and let us review and advise on a monthly basis to assist in ensuring the achievement of your businesses goals.

Monthly Guidance & Advice

We act as your Trusted Advisor

We will take your vision of your company’s future and turn it into a meaningful plan. We will achieve this by:

• Undertaking a Client Needs Analysis;
• Collaborative Development of a 90 Day Action Plan (i.e. dealing with all the “hot issues”);
• Develop the success factors of the business (i.e. KPI Development and Reporting);
• Establishment of an Advisory Board to meet monthly to monitor KPI’s and milestones;
• Conduct a series of Audits to develop Strategic Plans, Budgets, Cash Strategies and Exit & Succession Plans.

Specific Project Management

If you have any specific needs, then call us for assistance in any of the following areas:

Strategic Planning

Through a series of audits, we will work with you and your staff to identify and quantify the important factors that will affect your future growth and success. We will use that information to prepare financial projections and an accompanying plan narrative that helps you visualize and realize your company’s future.

Profitability Improvements

We will assess your operation looking for process inefficiencies that may be costing your company money. We will look for excesses in people or materials or other misallocations of resources. We can set up systems to help you measure productivity on an ongoing basis.

Business Turnaround

We follow a very simple yet structured procedure to achieve success in helping turn your business around. The procedure is as follows:

• Assess the situation. This is the key to success. Collaboratively we need to get a firm grasp on your company’s cash, cost and competitive positions. Obtain an understanding of why your firm is spending at its current level. Investigate your operations and discover where there are inefficiencies. Survey your clients and ex-clients as to why they buy from your company or why they have stopped buying.
• Develop a comprehensive restructuring plan. From the assessment, it will be clear what it will takes to turn your company around and find the core business on which to rebuild. This is the most difficult part of any company turnaround.
• Sell in the plan. After creation of the plan, we must get buy-in from the board, investors, bankers, creditors, management team and your employees
• Implement the plan. Tough decisions will need to be made and could lead to laying off workers, relocating, outsourcing etc. Accountability measures need to be established organization wide to ensure a change in culture moving forward.
• Build a safety net. Finally, when healthy again, Company wide KPI’s must be put in place to ensure early warning signals are available to prevent a repeat of the previous problems. The establishment of an Advisory Board that meets at least monthly to monitor KPI’s milestones is critical to success.

Exit and Succession Planning

Many successful business owners, caught up in the immediate demands of running a business, give little attention to what will happen to the business once they retire. Some owners postpone exit planning because the task seems too difficult. Others assume they can wait until retirement is imminent. For many business owners, exit planning is avoided because of the emotional issues involved. It’s simply too painful to imagine relinquishing control of what has been one’s greatest accomplishment, or to acknowledge that one will not live forever. Furthermore, family owned businesses have special needs, some of which can threaten the business’ existence as well as the harmony of the family. When you strip away everything, the core long-term decisions relate to control and wealth. Whether it’s an Exit Strategy for an owner-manager or a Succession Plan for a family business, both require careful planning well in advance. Your virtual cfo has the methodology and software in place (MAUS) to remove the mystique from this daunting task and create plans that will maximize the return on your business at the appropriate time.

Capital Raising

Although there is much investment capital available in Australia, raising it can be a tough road for entrepreneurs, particularly for early-stage or start-up companies. Australian investors/bankers can be described as more conservative when compared to their American counterparts.
The reasons for this conservatism can be attributed to one or more or the following reasons:

• Many investors/banks have lost money on a couple of past ventures, especially technology.
• The Australian market here is smaller and more fragmented when compared to the US, China or Europe (which have tens of millions of people at their doorstep). Therefore, there is less chance of new concepts getting up.
• The ASX was, until recently, doing very well. Why risk your money with a start-up/early-stage venture?
• The pool of genuine angel investors in Australia is small and hard to access. Promoters may need to do dozens of investor pitches in order to find the right one.

In short, it’s not hard to find the money; it’s just really hard to get the investors to part with it. Your virtual cfo will help you:

• Understand your marketplace thoroughly and who your direct and non-direct competitors are and include as much of this information as possible in your business plan.
• Assist in talking with and meeting as many investors, VC firms or bankers as possible, even before you are ready to raise capital. This enables an understanding of the investors’ requirements and appetite, if they have funded any companies that are competitors, or are similar, which will have a big impact on whether they choose to fund you.
• Adequately plan thus enabling your business to be clear on exactly how much you are asking for, what the funds are to be used for, and how much of the company it will represent. Any company valuation must be justified by way of comparable investments, assets, capital and time invested, listed benchmarks and projections. Value is where most negotiations fall down.
• Once agreement has been reached in principal, a term sheet or heads of agreement must be signed by both parties, Then work through necessary due diligence towards the point of funding.

Mergers, Acquisitions and Takeovers

We can help a business owner think through the idea of a merger, acquisition or takeover. We will assess whether the opportunity makes sense from a standpoint of acquiring: technology or other knowledge; customers; a new product line; marketing synergy; patents or other intangible assets; capacity; or, just a way to grow the business. We can then assist with due diligence, negotiations, and eventually, assimilation of the newly acquired business or assets.

Sounding Board

Owners of small to medium companies are very familiar with the concept that it is lonely at the top. They frequently don’t have anyone with whom they can discuss strategies and issues. What do you do with that problem customer, supplier, employee, or banker? Which way do you go with that key decision that could determine the future course of your business? Sometimes your virtual cfo is just a good sounding board. Like a “virtual” partner, we have a wealth of experience and business insight a company owner can tap into.

Risk and Opportunity Assessment

We will look at your operation in the context of your industry and the general business environment. We will use our wealth of experience and business insight to help you identify those risks and opportunities that may affect your company in the near and long term. We can also help you plan how you can avoid the risks and take advantage of the opportunities.

Growth Plan

Operating a growing business without a growth plan can be risky. The likelihood of success is much higher if there is a plan for when the business needs to add cash, people, training, knowledge, capacity, distribution channels, and more. We can help you create your plan and follow it.

Systems Assessment and Development

We will assess your existing systems to make certain they are operating efficiently and providing accurate results on a timely basis. Where systems are inadequate, or are non-existent, we can develop them for you. This might include, among others, your financial accounting system, cost accounting system, purchasing/accounts payable process, operations process flow, or system for measuring operations performance.

Key Success Factors

All businesses have key factors that, if monitored, can give an indication of how the business is doing. Monitoring such factors has an advantage over looking only at financial results. Financial statements are historical documents. They can only tell you what has already happened, and they usually do that the month following the events. Key Performance Indicators can tell you what is happening today and can sometimes predict what will happen in the future. We may find key factors in production, distribution, overtime statistics, sales operations, order taking, cash collections, inventory levels, backlog statistics, or other areas depending on the type of business you are in. We can identify these factors and set up a process for tracking and analysing them.

Organizational Structure

As businesses grow and change, their organizational structure frequently evolves into one that is less than optimum. The present structure is not what one would create if they were starting the business from scratch. The business may have become one that has misallocations of resources. It may not function like the well-oiled machine it once was. We can look at your business objectively, help you visualize your optimum structure, and create a plan to implement the changes that you decide you want to make.

All Areas of Financial Management including: