Business Advisory
Ambition needs a plan. MyCFO Advisory is your plan.
Compliance tells you what happened. Advisory decides what happens next.
This is the part of MyCFO Advisory that changes an owner’s year. Not the tax return that records it, but the work beyond that. How to price. Who to hire. Whether the next contract is worth taking, and what the business will be worth when you’re finished with it.
Forecast, decide, review. Then carry what you learn into the next forecast.
Why owners actually call
Most owners don’t have an advisory problem. They have a visibility problem.
Almost nobody arrives here asking for business advisory. They arrive because something specific has gone sideways.
None of those are accounting failures. They’re all the same failure: the owner is making decisions on numbers that are either too old, too aggregated, or never explained.
The account is empty the week before payday, and nobody can say why.
Revenue is up and take-home is down.
A partner wants out and nobody knows what the shares are worth.
January was the best month in years and the quarter still came back a loss.
The service line
What business advisory covers here
Six pieces of work, which you can take individually or as an ongoing engagement.
Sounding Board SolutionsCFO support at three levels, and how to tell which one you need.
Business Restructure & Entity SelectionThe entity decides your tax, your asset protection and what you keep on the way out.
- Annual Advisory Planning
One structured session a year covering results, tax outcomes, governance and what the next twelve months need to look like, including how you use the rest of these services.
- Business Restructure & Entity Selection
Getting the entity right, before a sale or a dispute makes it expensive to change.
- Business Planning & Improvement
A plan with numbers attached, and the follow-through to make it happen.
- Industry Benchmarking
How your margins, wages and overheads compare to businesses that actually look like yours.
- Sounding Board Solutions
CFO support at three levels, from mentoring through to a full board of advice. The engine room of this division.
- Internal Audit & Risk Management
Finding the gaps in your processes before somebody outside the business does.
A distinction worth making
Advisory is not coaching, and we’re not pretending otherwise
There is a large industry selling business coaching on motivation, frameworks and accountability. Some of it is good. None of it is this.
If what you need is someone to push you harder, we’re the wrong call. If what you need is to find out whether the push is even pointed in the right direction, that’s this.
Works on you — frameworks, accountability and pushing harder. Some of it is very good.
Works on the numbers, and then on what the numbers say you should do. The accountability is a by-product of having something measurable to be accountable to.
A coach works on you. We work on the numbers, and then on what the numbers say you should do.
Three questions
Where advisory usually starts
Three questions come up more than any others, and each one has a different entry point.
- Is this job actually making money?
You need job-level costing and a margin you can see. That is Sounding Board, usually at Level 2.
- Why is my profit not in my bank account?
You need cash-flow forecasting and someone to walk you through the gap between the two. Also Sounding Board.
- Am I doing better or worse than the business up the road?
You need benchmarks, not opinions. That is Industry Benchmarking, and it is usually the cheapest way to find out something uncomfortable and useful.
The journey
Three stages, and most owners are in the middle one
We think about this work in three stages, because owners arrive at different points and need different things.
Stage 01
Get clarity
The foundation. Accurate numbers, filed on time, that reconcile and mean something. If this is not right, nothing built on top of it is worth much.
Stage 02
Take control
Where this division lives. You stop reacting to the bank balance and start deciding from a forecast. This is the stage most owners are stuck below and do not realise it.
Stage 03
Plan your future
Valuation, succession, exit. What the thing is worth and how you get your money out of it. Most owners think about this far too late to change the answer.
Who this is for
Owners who have outgrown the information they’re getting
You’ve probably got an accountant already, and they’re probably fine at what they do.
The question isn’t whether your compliance is being handled. It’s whether anyone is doing the other half. The mechanics don’t change much by industry, but the questions do.
- Construction
For builders who want to get in control and build wealth, not just projects. A builder needs job costing first.
- Professional services
An architect, engineer or consultant needs profit per client before anything else is worth measuring.
- Hospitality and accommodation
An operator needs seasonal cash-flow modelling, because the average month does not exist in this industry.
Different businesses need different starting points.
The mechanism
What it looks like in practice
Advisory only works when someone is looking at your numbers more often than once a year.
You’ll know it’s working when you stop being surprised. Not because nothing goes wrong, but because you saw it coming with enough notice to do something about it.
Industry BenchmarkingUsually the cheapest way to find out whether you have a problem worth paying to fix.
- Monthly or quarterly
Depending on the level. Real management accounts rather than a year-old set of statements.
- A forecast that moves
Revised as reality moves, rather than built once and quietly abandoned in February.
- A conversation, not a pack
You get told what the numbers mean, rather than handed a report and left to work it out.
What it costs
Fixed fees, agreed before anything starts
What moves the number is scope, how many entities are involved, and whether we’re building reporting from scratch or maintaining something that already works. Benchmarking and a one-off planning session sit at the light end; ongoing CFO support is a monthly retainer.
Who you’d be working with
The same person each time
Izaak de Winter leads this work. Chartered Accountant, Registered Tax Agent, in business and tax advisory since 2008, most recently a Principal in the business services division of a national firm in Tasmania.
Why it matters here
Anyone can lodge a tax return correctly. Advisory depends on whether the person across the table has seen enough businesses to know which of your problems are normal and which ones aren’t.
An ongoing conversation connects the business evidence to the next decision.
Start with a consultation
Whether there’s a gap worth paying us to close.
A conversation about where the business is, what you’re trying to get to, and whether there’s a gap worth paying us to close. If the honest answer is that you need bookkeeping tidied up before any of this is useful, we’ll say so.
Book a consultation