How a financial controller can help improve the health of your SME
We know how hard it can be running your own SME. Too much to do, not enough time or staff, plus the feeling of constantly having to learn new skills to develop. You can be so busy trying to get by day to day, you don’t have the capacity to take a step back and review the health of your business, and ensure you’re making the right decisions for future success.
Bringing in an interim financial controller from Control Room Finance means you can enable one of our skilled FCs to have oversight of the business – and if something has gone wrong in, we will spot it first and help you to find a solution to the issue.
Understand the history and structure of your SME
Understanding how your business works, and more importantly why, is vitally important:
What are the processes around sales or returns?
What is the strategy for consumer engagement?
What is the perception of the brand and the culture from the outside?
Are we selling our products or services in accordance with the expectations of the customer?
And everything you do in a business ultimately comes back to customer satisfaction – happy customers drive more sales, happier staff and less time fixing things. Although you can separate a business into blocks of activity (such as Finance, Operations, Logistics, Digital Marketing etc.), it is important to see them all as interconnected.
For example, when preparing for the launch of a product. Social media talks to product design, product design talks to sales, sales to finance……you get the idea. Building these links is something a financial controller can help with.
When a CRF Financial Controller comes into a business they work tirelessly to understand the history of the company, its product origins and why they offer them. If you simply look at the figures, it may seem easy to advise the removal a product or service if it isn’t doing as well as others. But the why has to exist – some products only break even but act as the main avenue of customer engagement and acquisition.
Not taking this into account and bulldozing decisions without first understanding them, could be significant, removing a key cog in the business. We don’t believe in making decisions based simply on numbers in an SME; removing the culture, the staff or the passion can have much bigger effects in the long term. All SME owners spend a huge amount of time building their business, we get that and don’t jeopardise it!
Conduct regular business health check ins as you grow
With each SME, as you grow it’s essential to continue keep an eye on whether things are fit for purpose, what the business looks like with 3-4 people inevitably won’t be the same as 15-20. When you’re very small, each member of the company becomes a Jack of all trades – think administrators becoming shipping experts and coders becoming marketing leads! When you grow, the culture and structure changes.
There will be points where you will need to reassess whether you have the right people doing the right job, nurturing your team and developing their skills will continue to drive performance and profits. Viewing staff, systems and processes as the key to success is how we help you.
A Financial Controller should always take a holistic approach to your business’s health and soley focus on numbers, but the sum of the parts that make up your company, to help you keep get out of it what you put in.