Financial Mentoring

We have all the skills and experience needed to help you develop a strategy and deliver the numbers.

When you first start up in business, it’s generally on your own and the decisions that you make don’t feel like decisions because there is only you to please. If a customer challenges you on your price, you can take it or leave it, or if you haven’t any other work to do, what you agree to work for is a contribution towards your year-end earnings.

However, as things start to grow it can become more challenging quite quickly as you consider premises, overheads and headcount. That can be the time when you start feeling lonely and a little isolated, and also recognise that there are implications over a decision that previously wouldn’t have warranted a second thought. But why should things be different? Nothing much has changed, you are still doing things as successfully as before and moving in the right direction, but the first twinges of pressure can be felt as you start to realise that it’s maybe more than your own mortgage on the line.

Dealing with these doubts so that you keep moving forward at the pace you had generated, rather than dropping off and getting lapped by a similar competitor, is going to be crucial. In this regard our Financial Mentoring service may provide a solution and the partners at Lambert Chapman LLP are equipped to assist you in this area.

That doesn’t mean that you hand over all the important decisions to us. Far from it, we don’t want to be taking that responsibility from you, but it will allow you to raise an issue, discuss the thoughts that you have, maybe hear an opposing or additional thought to bear in mind based upon our experience so that you feel that the decision is clear and straight forward to implement. The mentoring side of things allows you to build confidence so that you keep things in your stride rather than having that feeling of running to catch up.

Many of our clients have concerns over the financial decisions that they have to make because nothing prepares you for the type of calculations that you need to undertake. We spend years in schools looking at trigonometry and other such stuff, but it doesn’t help us to think about pricing or overhead rates. That may not be true for real mathematicians but a lot of us spent our maths lessons looking longingly out the window at those lucky ones doing PE outside, not realising that an interest inside the room might help ready us for entrepreneurship later.

Helping clients get these costings right via a template for future use is of real benefit to the business manager and done correctly, helps them to negotiate from a position of strength knowing what an outcome will leave them with from a profit and cash point of view rather than working blind and waiting till the year end accounts to see how they have done.

For the more sophisticated business this type of support might follow a different path with our skills being put to use in the board room or at management meetings, helping to build a structure around an agenda or making sure that minutes and actions are produced. This type of Boardroom Support can be to the owner outside of the formal meeting either by phone or meeting, or it could be by working with the management group at a series of regular meetings on a specific project.

Sometimes in this arrangement we are carrying the finance function and present accounts for the period that we have either reviewed or helped to produce. We would look to help the business develop a financial pack that would include key performance indicators and provide help in developing systems to monitor them and build in performance improving suggestions from the team.

The key to this service is to be able to provide you with the experience needed to take up the baton and run with it, either as an individual or a team. It’s not for us to remain with you infinitum unless you continue to develop at such a pace that you feel that our input is still required.

So if you are feeling a little isolated out there at the moment or think that there are things that you probably should be doing but you are not, give us a call so that we can discuss your requirements and put a program into place.