As a business owner, you may hire someone to straighten up your books and file your tax return each year.  Is that all you’re getting from them?  These basic services do indeed provide a layer of required compliance that is expected of all businesses, but in and of themselves, they don’t provide the kind of horsepower you need to face the difficult and weighty business decisions you regularly face.  Here are some questions you might find yourself asking, with seemingly nowhere to turn for support:

What if I made this (fill-in-the-blank) strategic change, such as hiring more employees, opening a new location, buying a building or machinery, launching a new marketing campaign, adding another line of business, etc.?  How will it impact my profitability, and what will it do to my cash flow?  Are there other ways to approach this idea to lower risk, improve my cash position or increase odds of success?  Does this decision create a short-term benefit at the expense of long-term stability?  Where is the sweet spot to optimize all these factors?  What’s my return on investment, and how long will it take to reach a break-even point?  Should I get a loan to finance this decision?  Can I even get a loan based on my business financials?

Notice the two words that start a typical line of questioning…What if??  Business leaders are regularly running “what-if” scenarios through their heads.  The most successful leaders do more than that, they run them through other peoples’ heads as well, to get experienced and varied perspectives.  This is the role of a trusted financial advisor.  Large companies have CFOs filling this role for their CEOs.  Smaller business CEOs need the same type of trained, experienced listeners to ponder ideas with.

Your spouse or friend may be a good listener and want to help you succeed, but he/she may or may not be adding to the conversation with active questioning, objective evaluation, suggestions for enhancement, alternative perspectives, analysis of likely impact, financing options, and the myriad other factors that make an advisor more than just a good listener.  A good advisor will respectfully and constructively challenge your ideas and plans.  The synergistic relationship will make your final decisions stronger than if you made them alone, and add confidence in carrying them out.

In some ways, the mid-sized company CEO is in the toughest spot.  Are you leading a business that is too big to NOT have a CFO, but still too small to hire one full time?  A trusted advisor relationship may be the missing piece of the puzzle for you.

At Neilley and Co., we seek to build advice-oriented relationships with enterprising growth-minded business owners.  Let’s connect and explore the possibility of engaging as your trusted business advisor.