financial mentoring
The self help method of assisting you and your company is finance mentoring, sometimes known as coaching. But the difference between business coaching and mentoring is that the mentoring is targeted at your accounting and finance staff – most notably your controller or CFO.
Many times your senior accounting and finance staff are very skilled but may need some help in key areas centering on finance. Basically we share many years of the ‘tricks of the trade” with your staff. This includes banking and finance, forecasting, working capital, cash and treasury management, balance sheet management and risk assessment – to name a few.
We don’t mentor your sales personnel, or your payroll or AP or AR personnel or your other support staff – we mentor your finance personnel. We teach how to analyze, to analyze for lower risk and higher profitability; to increase value.
Depending on need, I also share my “tools of the trade” as well including proprietary models, spreadsheet and tactics. But we leave them only when you know how to use them.
Warning – this mentoring makes your finance and accounting managers more valuable and the resulting accountability may be too much for current staff. With this knowledge your accounting and finance personnel should be held to a higher standard, because they should be holding themselves to a higher standard. Higher standards mean higher value.
consulting
Sometimes you just need a little help for a short duration. Your need may not extend to CFO Services or Mentoring and that’s where we offer traditional consulting services. For an hourly fee, we will provide any needed financial assistance whether it be for a particular project, or just an overall financial review, or the need to review a lending proposal before being submitted to the bank or help writing a credit policy.
There may also be a time in the fiscal year when some experienced help could be handy. We have stepped in many times to assist businesses at year-end closing or banking negotiations or tax credit application and negotiations.
Consulting work, while not as defined as CFO Services or Mentoring, it is nevertheless very important to meet the periodic and sometimes immediate needs of the business owner and we stand ready to step in.
How is our consulting different from others? We prefer to not only define the task and offer recommendations and plans, but to help management put their decisions into action. We resist making the decisions since it is critical that management take ownership in all their business including decision-making.
There are times when our recommendations differ from those of other advisors – accountant, attorney, other advisors and even internal staff – and we think that is healthy. Getting differing perspectives is important, but when a particular issue regards business finance, we believe we are the experts and should carry the weight associated with these expertise’s.
Flexible for Your Needs
We understand that building your business makes your schedule crazy. For that reason, we don’t want to add to the chaos, so our consultants maintain a flexible schedule to meet your needs on your time frame.
Contact us today for more details, to get a free quote on our services or to schedule an appointment.