Business advisory

What this covers

Compliance tells you what happened. Advisory work is about what happens next: whether you can afford the hire, what the business would fetch, how to fund growth without giving away more than you need to, and what has to be true before you can step back from it.

This is the work that benefits most from an adviser who already knows your numbers, which is why it usually sits alongside the accounts rather than being bought in separately when something urgent comes up.

What you get

• Budgets and rolling forecasts you can actually run the business from
• Cash flow modelling, including seasonality and tax payment timing
• Scenario planning: price changes, new hires, lost contracts
• Funding support, from bank lending to investor-ready information
• Business valuations for sales, share issues and shareholder disputes
• Group structures, holding companies and reorganisations
• Share schemes and incentivising key people
• Exit and succession planning, started early enough to matter

Funding

Lenders and investors ask for the same things: a credible forecast, clean historic numbers and an explanation that holds together. We prepare the information, and we will tell you plainly if we think the case is not yet strong enough, which is more useful than a polished pack that gets declined.

Exit and succession

The tax outcome on a sale is usually determined years before the sale happens, by how the company is structured and how long conditions for relief have been met. Business Asset Disposal Relief, share classes, and whether the buyer wants shares or assets all need thinking about well in advance. Two years ahead is a reasonable minimum; five is better.