Business assessment

Future Positive Consulting is a partner for ambitious high growth companies. We believe that a combination of clear and well defined strategic corporate goals, market opportunities, leadership skills, sound financial disciplines and a strong ethical position are the pathways to success for companies. Our aim is to work with you to develop your business in these ways and help steer a path to profitable and sustained growth.

We help you cut through financial jargon and broaden the focus beyond simple (and sometimes dangerously misleading) metrics of sales growth and profit and loss accounts, to develop a clearer understand of cash flows, balance sheets, cost of capital and how to add economic value, shareholder value and also stakeholder value in a wider sense.

We can work with you to assess business opportunities by looking at you own business and the markets you operate in. We can carry out due diligence into your offering and provide a published independent financial health check and will be pleased to help you analyse this and develop your business plan to reflect the opportunities and challenges in this. Where required, we can help you present your case to potential backers.

We can help you understand your business strengths and areas for improvement by:

• Conducting in-depth diagnostics using a range of diagnostic and benchmarking tools
• Facilitating management review sessions
• Providing reports and action plans
• We can design, facilitate, analyse and present reports to help you manage your business better.
• We can conduct a range of surveys, including:
  
  • Staff satisfaction
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Customer needs analysis

We offer our support as a trusted and respected independent advisor, either on a consultancy or non-exec basis, dealing with all strategic and financial matters and tailoring our approach to your needs.

Direction, Strategy and goals

We can use our financial and a management experience to work with you to assist in the formulation of strategies to achieve growth, financing or exit management. We address four main elements:

• Strategic analysis – where is the business now
• Strategic Choice – where could the business be (assessment of business opportunities etc)
• Strategic Planning – how can we get there – including financial, and other, skills development for the senior management team
• Strategic Implementation – staying with you to make the plan work, for as long as it takes

Understanding and using Financial information

We can work with you to help you, your leaders and managers understand and use financial data to drive the business forward. We often find that business owners and managers are not hugely confident or enthusiastic about financial information, using phrases such as “Oh, the numbers are nothing to do with me”, or “That’s not my job. My job is to keep the sales coming in and everything will be ok”. We work with managers to help them with the vital task of they understanding and using financial information to monitor and improve their business.

We understand that working managers don’t want blinded with theory or detail, so we take a practical and straightforward approach that cuts straight to the chase. We begin with some straightforward questions to try and gauge how much of an understanding they have of whatever financial information available to them (if any!). Depending on the context, questions might include,

1. Is your business as profitable as you want it to be?
2. Do you have the cashflow under control?
3. Why is there not more money in the bank?

These, and similar questions, open up discussions about all areas in the business. These discussions are not just to allow us to get a better understanding of how the business ticks but also to get the business owner to work on their business for a little while rather than in it.

One of the best phrases we hear as business advisers is when a client says, “I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about that before”. This usually means they are starting to think about how their business works and how to make it better rather than just running to stand still.