The Challenge

Although this national organisation deliver a great service to their clients, the internal picture was looking rather different. They were constantly encountering problems and issues with their in-house finance department which was drawing the CEO into fire fighting and robbing him of time for important strategic planning for the business. He was working long hours and weekends as he struggled to coach senior finance staff through their roles and feeling increasing pressure as his time for other critical tasks and responsibilities as CEO was dwindling. He had no confidence in his team or the numbers coming from their department. Ultimately he felt like he’d lost financial control. This situation became stressful for him and as a consequence his love of the business and excitement for its future potential began to die.

The Solution

We took time to ensure we could accurately identify why the issues were occuring before prescribing what could be done to correct them. We worked closely with the CEO to get to know him, his way of working and his goals for the business. We were also able to provide him with the immediate level of support and advice he needed to begin to stabilise the ship. In depth consultation with the financial accounting team gave us a fuller understanding of their roles and where skills gaps were arising. We carried out a comprehensive systems audit to identify where their technology wasn’t fit for purpose and failing to support the requirements of the business. Armed with this detailed assessment we outlined how staffing resources could be streamlined, where the right kind of technology could be implemented and ultimately developed a concise blueprint of how all these actions would lead to the outcomes the CEO was looking for.

…business owners can get 60%+ of their time back…

The Results

The business completely reshaped its internal finance department and also changed accountant (on our recommendation as we discovered that they were not providing a high quality service and had encouraged our client to invest heavily in software that was not fit for purpose). Through the smart technology and processes we have implemented the CEO has much more control and complete confidence in the data. He is now able to make informed decisions about the future direction of the business. Everything we have devised has been scalable so the business has incredible capacity to grow. The streamlining immediately made the organisation more profitable, outside of any revenue growth and the CEO feels he is now in a position to double the size of the business from a significantly lower cost base. He has personally ‘got his life back’ (he estimates some 60% of his time) as well as his excitement for the potential of the organisation and can now focus completely on the bigger picture and the direction he wants to take it.