finance advice

The result of poor plan­ning is often rushed and mis­in­formed deci­sions, over/under capac­i­ty, inef­fi­cien­cy and missed oppor­tu­ni­ties. Every busi­ness own­er needs to invest time in devel­op­ing a long-term plan, start­ing with what you want to achieve from your invest­ment and what your rea­sons for being in busi­ness are, and then devel­op­ing a plan to help achieve these objec­tives.

We are well placed to help you devel­op these plans and have a con­sid­er­able pool of expe­ri­ence and exper­tise to draw on. The finan­cial aspects are usu­al­ly the back­bone to any busi­ness plan and you need to ensure that this aspect has been ade­quate­ly dealt with in your plan. A high-qual­i­ty busi­ness plan is essen­tial in order to secure most forms of busi­ness fund­ing. Our busi­ness fund­ing ser­vice is avail­able to assist our clients with all aspects of busi­ness fund­ing.

In today’s cli­mate this is an extreme­ly dif­fi­cult area but by under­stand­ing the require­ments of lenders and work­ing with them rather than against them it is usu­al­ly pos­si­bly to obtain a more sat­is­fac­to­ry arrange­ment than clients could get work­ing with­out our advice.

CASE STUDY: We have been work­ing very close­ly with one par­tic­u­lar client and their bank over the last 12 months. The busi­ness was prof­itable but had cash­flow prob­lems. By agree­ing an action plan and work­ing with the client, the bank and HMRC, we were able to help to keep the busi­ness going to the point where it is now more prof­itable, the cash­flow is much bet­ter, HMRC are up-to-date and the bank has backed off.

There are many forms of gov­ern­ment sup­port avail­able for busi­ness­es of all sizes and although the paper­work some­times seems like it is not worth it, our expe­ri­ence enables us to assist clients to deter­mine what is right for them and to take them through the appli­ca­tion process.

CASE STUDY: One of our clients whom we work with extreme­ly close­ly has secured sig­nif­i­cant gov­ern­ment sup­port includ­ing £225K of RSA grant and 2 rounds of EFG (enter­prise finance guar­an­tee) based bank lend­ing total­ly £950K.

Some­times busi­ness­es are under­cap­i­talised and require an injec­tion of equi­ty from an exter­nal source such as a busi­ness angel or ven­ture cap­i­tal firm. By work­ing close­ly with our clients we can help to iden­ti­fy such a require­ment as far in advance as a pos­si­ble there­by mak­ing it eas­i­er and often less expen­sive to raise the fund­ing. We will also assist our clients in the nego­ti­a­tions in order to achieve a deal that works for all par­ties.

CASE STUDY: One of our clients that we had helped to raise over £2m of such fund­ing, was sold, net­ting the investors that had been intro­duced returns of over 150% and the orig­i­nal investors over 1700%.

Oth­er fund­ing comes from such areas as lease/hire pur­chase invoice finance/factoring and even just prop­er man­age­ment of the work­ing cap­i­tal that is locked up in the busi­ness. We have exten­sive expe­ri­ence in all of these areas.