Speak to our virtual FD services team today
Has your professional services firm outgrown its finance function?
Growth is the priority for most owner-managed professional services firms. Winning new clients, developing services and recruiting talented people all contribute to stronger profitability.
Most successful professional services businesses are founded by people with expertise in their profession, not in finance. Consultants, architects, engineers, recruiters, lawyers and agency owners build their businesses around specialist knowledge, not around management accounts, cash flow forecasts or financial controls. As the business grows, though, finance becomes increasingly important, and the systems that worked when the business employed ten people often start to strain at thirty, fifty or a hundred.
Many owner-managed businesses reach a point where they need more than transactional finance support, but aren’t yet ready to justify the cost of a full-time Finance Director or CFO. At the same time, management teams are increasingly looking for reliable financial information to support decisions around recruitment, growth, investment and cash flow.
Has your finance function kept pace with your business?
You may have outgrown your current finance function if:
- Management information arrives too late
- Cashflow forecasting is unreliable
- You lack visibility over profitability
- Strategic decisions rely on instinct rather than data
- Compliance is taking increasing management time
- Recruitment and growth plans are difficult to model
Growth creates complexity
A growing professional services business faces challenges very different from those of its early years. Recruitment plans become harder to assess without reliable forecasting, project profitability becomes more difficult to measure, and working capital requirements increase.
Management teams need greater visibility over future financial performance, rather than simply reviewing historic results, and that’s usually where the gap between the business today and the support it actually needs starts to show.