My CFO was founded in 2013 and provides management advisory and CFO services to businesses. Traditionally the accounting profession has provided a retrospective view of the business, but from the beginning, My CFO has assisted clients with a forward-focused view to move successfully into the future. Today, we’re launching Gestalt Business Solutions to broaden the support of owners and their teams as they build best-in-class businesses. Gestalt will focus on strategic planning and execution, fractional integration, value creation, and transactions while My CFO continues to focus on fractional CFO, Finance and Accounting Advisory, and transaction support services. Together, through My CFO and Gestalt, we work to support you in efforts to identify, protect, and maximize your business.
Identify: Utilizing an insights tool from our partner, Quist to process financial and non-financial inputs, you’re provided an assessment identifying the strategic range of value for your business as well as strengths and opportunities for sustainable and transferable value creation. This baseline and report add context to our discussions around what it means to be best-in-class and inform the strategic planning process.
Protect: Once the owner’s vision is explored or clarified – both personally and from the business perspective – it is important to establish who you are (values), where you are (current state), and what you need (defining results). To establish this, we help you discover and/or clarify the values, purpose, economic foundations, and structure that your work and business are built on. Growth on a weak, unclear, or unstable foundation is futile. This is also the time to solidify your financial reporting systems and information. Forward-focused insights, not historical perspectives, are critical for making decisions to protect, grow, and maximize your business.
Maximize: After you’ve identified the areas where the most value can be gained in becoming best in class and clarified your vision, foundations, and structure, you’ve positioned yourself for continued valued creation. Growth and value creation are similar and often happen in tandem, but they are not the same. Growth drives revenue and business income and adds to how the size of your business is measured. A business can be big and growing, but still not be best-in-class, or maximizing the potential. Value creation adds to the quality of the business by improving the factors that impact the multiple that the private capital markets are willing to assign to your business. Simply put, a best-in-class business is higher quality and less risky as measured by the multiple. Therefore, best-in-class businesses are more valuable than a similar-sized, but not best-in-class business.
Don’t think this applies to you because you aren’t thinking about selling your business or expect a generational transfer? Don’t want to think about these things until you are ready to sell? Consider,
· Ready ≠ Prepared: Transitioning a business takes approximately a year and preparation to maximize your business value (becoming best-in-class) is a process that can take planning and executing over three to five years or more, depending on your objectives.
· 70% to 80% of businesses put on the market don’t sell.
· 50% of business ownership exits are unplanned or due to unforeseen circumstances.
We can show you how planning and executing to be a best-in-class business maximizes the value and income of your business – regardless of the timing of the path of your business. So, having a best-in-class is just good business strategy.
Know a business owner that doesn’t know the value of their business and/or is exhausted from being everything to everyone in their business? Reach out. We’d love to understand more.