Kevin has over 35 years experience as a Chartered Accountant and business advisor, working with senior leaders across all major sectors, from fully listed PLC’s to high growth individual entrepreneurs. He also has significant experience in business leadership and personal coaching and mentoring. Kevin applied this experience to providing significant business growth and consulting services to support you as a business and an individual, whatever stage of growth your business is experiencing.
Apart from providing all your accounting, tax and compliance needs, we will work with you and your team to get to know you as individuals, your business and strategy, your goals and ambitions and draw on Kevin’s wealth of advisory experience to accelerate your growth and help unlock your potential.
Your company Purpose, Vision and Values, Brand, and Employee Value Proposition should all work together to help you create and sustain an inclusive culture where both the business and people thrive. The goal is to express the essence of what your company offers to customers, employees, and stakeholders, in a way that inspires trust and credibility. This can be incredibly powerful to help align your people behind a common purpose and provide a valuable framework to help define how you expect your people and senior leaders to act through the company Values framework.
If you want to build an inclusive, high-performing culture, clarifying your Purpose, Vision, Values and Brand is essential. We partner with clients and their teams to help you develop the framework, articulate it in an understandable and meaningful way with your clients and internal teams and embed the framework for sustainability and future development.
Developing a strategy for your business is essential for growth. It requires you to deepen your understanding of the way your business works and its position relative to other businesses in your markets. A strategic plan should not be confused with a business plan. A business plan is about setting short- or mid-term goals and defining the steps necessary to achieve them. A strategic plan is typically focused on a business’ mid- to long-term goals and explains the basic strategies for achieving them. As a starting point, you need to ask yourself the following three questions:
- Where is your business now? This involves understanding as much about your business as possible, including how it operates internally, what drives its profitability, and how it compares with competitors. Keep your review separate from day-to-day work and be realistic, detached and critical in distinguishing between the cause and effect of how your business operates. You should also write it down and review it periodically.
Where do you want to take it?
Here you need to set out your top-level objectives. Work out your vision, mission, objectives, values, techniques and goals. Where do you see your business in five or ten years? What do you want to be the focus of your business and your source of competitive advantage over your rivals in the marketplace? This step should be the foundation for the final plan and motivate change.- What do you need to do to get there? What changes will you need to make in order to deliver on your strategic objectives? What is the best way of implementing those changes – what changes to the structure and financing of your business will be required and what goals and deadlines will you need to set for yourself and others in the business? Think about the business as a whole, for example consider diversification, existing growth, acquisition plans, as well as functional matters in key areas.
We have over 30 years experience in helping business grow through effective strategic planning. This can be as simple as spending a day with the senior team in your business to start the strategic planning and direction process, through to running comprehensive off site workshops to engage your whole team
Whether driven by trading decline, cash preservation or performance improvement motivations, organisations of all sizes are now reviewing and resetting their cost base. This can deliver significant savings and profit improvement.
Our approach seeks to help businesses deliver sustainable savings whilst retaining core operational resilience. We look beyond discretionary spend controls and explore all forms of direct and indirect costs. This might involve renegotiating existing contracts with suppliers, reviewing discretionary spend, exploring alternative supplier options, considering alternative corporate structures, reviewing how cash can be extracted in a more tax and cost efficient way.
To generate a step change in cost reduction, businesses need to go beyond a simple review of line items and undertaking a ‘salami-slicing’ approach. This approach can often serve to demotivate employees as well as create a visible decline in customer satisfaction. Perhaps most importantly, this incremental method doesn’t tend to generate very much in the way of meaningful or lasting savings.
Management instead need to assess how all costs can be controlled or minimised through taking a more holistic approach. This can include making rapid changes in working procedures, finding and applying best practice techniques and by embedding a positive shift in corporate culture that maximises efficiency whilst preserving value.
Managing working capital effectively is critical for any growing business. Many businesses have struggled and even not survived, because this critical area has not been properly managed. The key challenge for a growing business is how to fund the timing between your outgoings for salaries, good and services, overheads and the payments you receive from your customers or clients. Depending on your business, this timing difference can be significant and if not properly managed, can quickly spiral out of control and leave you struggling to fund your business. We can help you significantly improve your working capital by:
Assess your working capital health and identify areas for improvement, including reducing the time it takes your customers to pay or negotiating extended payment terms with your suppliers. This can release significant amounts of cash back into the business.
Prepare cashflow forecasts that predict working capital needs to ensure you can adequately plan for shortfalls in cash and arrange short or long term lending if required.
Consider efficient funding options to manage working capital pressures and release cash into the business.
Provide key monitoring ratios to ensure working capital efficiency is maximised.
Cash is critical to the success of any business and the lack of cash is the single biggest reason that businesses fail. While you might be generating profit, this doesn’t mean you are generating a cash surplus because of the timing difference between having to pay cash out of your business and receiving cash in, which causes peaks and troughs of cash throughout the year.
We can prepare the detailed cashflow forecasting that are important as your business grows, so you can plan ahead for shortages in cash and make adequate plans to address that before it’s too late.
This might involve reviewing your working capital management to release cash back into the business, or arranging finance to bridge the cash requirement, both or which need significant planning.
Banks are far more likely to accommodate your needs if they are anticipated and monitored in a controlled and responsible way. Regular cashflow forecasts provide reliable evidence to prospective lenders that a business in well run.
Growing businesses may not always be able to finance their plans for further growth or make acquisitions from internal cash flows alone.
We have worked with companies at a variety of different stages in the business life cycle looking to access funding to enable growth or to allow current shareholders to diversify their business risk. There is a wide range of financing options available and we focus on helping you match the right type of funding to meet the demands of the business and its owners.
Debt
We work closely with the company owners to ensure that the financial structure of the business is closely aligned with the business strategy. It is only by achieving this match that the potential for the company can be achieved in a stable and unrestricted manner. There is a growing range of debt financing options available, so it is becoming more of a challenge for business owners to find the right package to suit their needs.
We specialise in supporting businesses secure short and medium term finance. We can prepare business plans cashflow forecasts to support funding applications and review working capital requirements to help you assess what funding is required and where that can be sourced from. We can make introductions to a wide range of lenders so you can make the right decision of what type of borrowing you require and who to approach to take it further.
Equity
Equity funding is a great way to raise the capital needed. We are able to guide companies through the complexities of equity finance raising, from company valuations, EIS (Enterprise Investment Schemes), assistance with business plans, and introductions to corporate finance professionals, PE & VC introductions and crowdfunding.
Establishing a market value for your business can be a tricky process. There are a number of factors to consider. Business valuation advisory is an art and not a science and ultimately it depends on what one willing party is prepared to pay to another. However, getting the best valuation requires expertise and experience to arrive at a value that is appropriate, as well as being supported by reasonable argument and sound judgement. It also needs to be sensitive to the needs of the seller and the motivational drivers of the buyer.
We have significant experience in providing valuation estimates for small and medium sized businesses to support the following:
- Share and business valuations for commercial or strategic purposes
- Succession and retirement planning
- Independent valuations for exit or shareholder dispute resolution
- Matrimonial or litigation processes
- Funds raising and equity investments
- Share options schemes
Transferring ownership can be an emotional and complicated process and this is why it is often ignored until it becomes an issue. The best advice is that even if you think you have years to go before you will have to consider exit and succession planning, it is best to start thinking about it now
Ways of transferring ownership can be complex and can include disposing of the business, or shares in the business, through a sale, management buyout, management buy-in or realising your investment through a voluntary liquidation. Transfers to family members is also an option if the intent is to keep your wealth in the family. The viability of each route depends on personal circumstances and personal choice. A usual driver is tax efficiency.
We have extensive experience in supporting business owners develop an effective exit or succession plan, particularly family owned businesses. We understand the complexities and sensitivities involved, the tax planning opportunities and the emotional challenge of exiting or leaving a business.
Whether buying or selling a business, second chances are hard to come by. We can work alongside you, to make sure that it’s done right first time! For most people, acquiring or disposing of a business is not an everyday event and so it is essential that your decisions are informed by accurate and up-to-date figures.
If you are entering into a management buy-out/in, buying or selling a business, raising finance, requiring a due diligence review, or simply appraising a new commercial venture, having the right professional advice can be the difference between realising your dreams, or a total disaster. AWK will work with your bankers and solicitors and can support you with:
Selling a business
From identifying the right buyer and helping you to prepare for the sale, to ultimately ensuring you achieve maximum value.Buying a business
Whatever your motivation for buying a business, whether to boost your company profit, to expand geographically, to secure new customers or to add new products or services to your business, we have the expertise you need.Due Diligence
The importance of conducting thorough due diligence, before any sort of formal purchase agreement is entered into, should not be underestimated. AWK can help you to uncover any risks, anomalies or unforeseen liabilities that could potentially undermine negotiations and, ultimately, the viability of a purchase.