It’s sometimes helpful to compare a business with the human life cycle: birth, puberty, marriages, offspring, divorces, serious illness etc. Each stage has its own unique challenges and opportunities.
Setting up a new business, managing growth, acquiring and selling businesses, changing the business model to respond to market conditions and ultimately, realising your investment in order to retire – all these impact the financial and other resources of the business. Some will involve outside parties, like banks, investors, maybe competitors who are buying or selling a business.
Few Owner Managed Businesses have either the technical skills or the market experience inhouse, to meet these challenges from a position of strength.
My Advisory services include corporate finance advice and in some cases, joining the board as a non-executive director.
Corporate Finance
- Developing Strategy
- Preparing a Business Plan (or Investment/Sale Memorandum)
- Preparing a Financial Model
- Raising Capital
- Managing the transaction: targeting, negotiating, structuring, project managing, valuation, liaison with lawyers, accountants and other professionals
Click here for case studies: capital raising, offer for sale, start ups.
Non-Executive Director (’NED’)
An NED is an experienced person, sometimes with a background in one particular skill set eg finance, marketing, technology – who formally joins the board of directors and provides input to the management who make the decisions, but who does not him/herself have responsibility to carry out any decisions.
So an NED is there as an advisor (but unlike a consultant, is ‘inside’ the business), is a sounding board, an objective and independent mind, and a source of valuable contacts.
I have over ten years of experience in this capacity, both with a commercial and not for profit organisations. Click here for a case study.