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Congratulations on becoming a mid-sized
company. For those who decide who grow to this level (which
is not for everybody; there is nothing wrong either with staying
at a smaller size), this is quite an accomplishment. It
usually means a change in your leadership style- what works at
one level does not always carry over. It also usually means
some dramatic changes in structure (multiple companies, divisions
or facilities), products/services (more than one broad category)
and location (national in scope and perhaps international as well).
With those changes come new challenges. We can help you
get there and stay there, so life goes well at this stage.
- Leveraging your financial staff.
By this point, you probably have a good CFO on board.
Even for the best ones, circumstances can change resulting in
a big increase in the workload or a need for expertise outside
the current staff. However, you realize it does not make
sense to add more to the headcount. We can be a resource
to the CFO or others, helping you get past the crunch while
keeping the current operations going.
- Filling in as CFO. In
rare cases, you might suddenly find yourself without a CFO.
We can step in and fill the gap and help you find the next one.
At a sausage manufacturer, due to a relocation they lost both
their VP Finance and Controller within a month. We stepped
in, got things running even better, and helped them find a Corporate
Controller to fill the spot. Not only did we fill the
gap, we reduced the top level in finance by one person.
The client was able to get more done with less.
- Managing your financial resources.
Are you getting the most out of your working capital?
We often find ways to cut down the investment while maintaining,
if not improving customer relationships. At a telecom
client that grew very rapidly in two years after launch to $200
million revenues, we were called in to help assess their collections
area. While we found bad debts were running much higher
than expected, we helped cut these by over 90% in just one year,
to under 5% of sales, in line with their industry average.
- Capital raising. Your
growth may be continuing. We can help you plan and get
ready for bringing in additional capital.
- Budgeting. At this stage,
you may have put in your first budgeting process or have refined
it from your earlier sales level. We have helped mid-sized
companies streamline their budgeting process while pulling in
more pertinent information. We allow people to spend more
time analyzing and discussing the numbers instead of most of
their time producing the numbers. In addition, we integrate
the budget numbers into the mainstream reporting, so that you
can track your ongoing progress easily.
- Profitability assessment.
Once you have multiple product lines and services, it can become
harder to tell where the money is really being made. You
might not be as profitable where you think you are and vice
versa. Our work can help get this back in focus.
In addition to making adjustments on the products or services
that you emphasize, it also can be a catalyst for cost reductions
to increase your margins.
- Turning data into action.
As you have gotten larger, you now have more data. Data
without action is worthless. We can help get at your data,
turn it into meaningful reporting tools and recommend ways you
can take action from the data. We are good at finding
hidden value.
- Profit Improvement. Looking
to do better? Feeling a challenge to get things moving?
We can help identify opportunities and hit at the heart of the
challenges. We then go deeper, finding the root causes,
suggesting improvements and help you get your resources in line
to help implement the changes to higher profits.
- Faster Closes. There are
benefits to getting your numbers out quicker. You might
have found that you are taking longer to close the books than
when you were smaller. We can help you find ways to squeeze
time out of your reporting process. You might have divisions
or subsidiaries that have trouble meeting your timelines and
are the last ones to report each month- we can help get them
up to speed.
- Dashboards. As the company
grows, you can start to feel out of touch with how things are
doing. You might not have the same handle on the business
as you did when it was smaller. We have put together dashboards
for clients that covered financial, marketing and operational
information. The dashboard helps people quickly keep on
top of key results and stimulates further improvements in those
areas. What gets measured and watched gets done.
These are just some of many ways
we can help you as a mid-sized company. Let's make this
stage a successful one for you.
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