If you’ve ever made New Year’s resolutions, you’ll know things never quite go to plan.
Unexpected challenges and variables—both external and internal—can affect our goals and priorities. And sometimes one may feel stuck, or overwhelmed by the need to pivot and adapt to changes going on around us.
That’s why it’s important to regularly take some time to reflect, reassess, and recalibrate our actions and strategies—using fresh eyes to look at all the angles.
Old habits die hard, and fear of the unknown can be crippling
We’re six months into 2023, are you currently where you expected to be across your priorities? Does something need to be adjusted, but can’t put your finger on exactly what? Is something holding you back from taking action because of concerns about a needed course correction, perhaps, grappling with how changes might impact you or your organization?
It’s easy to get complacent and stuck in a rut of just going through the motions, checking boxes to feel accomplished… only to realize something is incomplete or not working, and that things need some shaking up.
And when a situation is challenging, it’s common to continue to do what feels easy, pushing forward in auto-pilot mode with what we think works according to our typical patterns and routines, and hoping for the best—or for something different to magically happen that will address the obstacles showing up. But…
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.” ~ Jessie Potter
What to change? What to let go?
Circumstances are likely different than when you launched into this year: what was important in January might not be as crucial in June and the rest of the year.
You may need to find ways to be more efficient and cost-effective in your business activities, but you could be struggling with the question of whether to keep doing the same things, or to cut everything and worry later.
You might be wondering how you can streamline, yet still get the essential information needed to establish a new baseline and quickly reconfigure, keeping the minimum accounting, reporting and analysis required to still support a growing business.
How can you get over the hump and fearlessly tackle necessary evolution?
This is an ideal time to be strategic and do some conscious stock-taking—to do a timely mid-year assessment of long term prospects and projects, and update your views on possible solutions.
As you head into the second half of the year, be willing to obtain independent feedback and consider different perspectives to establish some new checks and balances and quickly get clarity that allows for survival in the present, while you continue moving forward.
Now is the right time to be open to new insights and be bold about tackling change. You should:
- Identify the gaps and opportunities in your current situation
- Seek feedback and perspective from experts and peers
- Assess and align your actions with your vision, goals and values
- Streamline your processes and optimize your resources
- Embrace change and courageously pursue your goals
No time like the present: take charge of the future now!
If the last time you did a stock take of your situation was when the year felt fresh and full of promise to strategize a new direction, a mid-year check in session might be just what’s needed to help you re-evaluate your progress and adjust your plans for the rest of the year.
Are you willing to embrace change and set a new baseline to renew your trajectory and reestablish a foundation for strong growth and continue to thrive?
No matter where your organization is in its journey, this annual halfway mark is a valuable opportunity to get clarity, confidence, and momentum for the second part of the year. Whether you need a small tweak or a major pivot, RoseRyan’s finance and accounting experts can jump in to help you and your organization take stock and make the best decisions to stay on track.
Get in touch to talk through what you require, or book your rapid assessment session with us now.
Wishing you all the best for whatever the remainder of 2023 may bring: seize the day!
Corporate Governance Guidelines for Successful E-commerce Businesses
Managing an e-commerce business means operating at a fast pace in a competitive industry. Retail e-commerce sales in the US passed the $1 trillion mark over the course of 2022. As your company aims to flex to the whims of your customer base, better ways to market your e-commerce business, and advances in how to effectively source, sell, and distribute your wares, there’s another concern to pay attention to: corporate governance guidelines. While this aspect of running a business is not always top of mind and won’t have an effect on today’s sales, making a mistake in this regard could put a stop to the pace your company is experiencing. By following governance guidelines, your company and leadership can establish workable processes and procedures and then focus on what you do best—running the business.
What Are Governance Guidelines?
Corporate governance guidelines usually center around the board of directors and the expectations of how they will operate, such as the structure of the board, the criteria for joining the board, and how long each director will serve.
Another way to look at governance guidelines is around the tone and controls a company sets, to ensure that integrity is built into its finances. After the corporate scandals of the early 2000s, publicly traded companies are required to firm up their corporate governance structure and their internal controls over financial reporting, as they are subject to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. These expectations have trickled down to private companies that plan to eventually make an initial public offering, although this may be a slower process as they have other priorities. It may be up to the board of directors to scrutinize and suggest improvements to policies and procedures that ensure financial integrity becomes or is a constant part of the company.
Corporate Governance Guidelines: Best Practices
Some best practices for corporate governance guidelines include:
For the last (but important) bullet, an effective way to ensure compliance is to turn to outside experts who can offer an objective and informed view on whether the company is doing what it should be doing—and that it is doing so efficiently. The rules that accompanied Sarbanes-Oxley (namely Section 404) were notoriously known for bogging down companies at first, but experts in the field have helped companies streamline their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance while also helping privately held companies prepare for the new compliance requirements that publicly traded companies must follow.
Following a Corporate Governance Guide
Ultimately, any company’s internal corporate governance guide, if they have one, will follow industry best practices, but it should be customizable to how your company operates. Do employees know what’s expected of them? Does the company encourage employees—and top executives—to act and operate with integrity? Are financial processes, procedures, and systems set up in such a way that the company’s financial information can be relied upon?
As an e-commerce company grows and expands, these questions should continue to be answered as policies will need to be regularly reviewed to ensure they are still relevant to what the business has become. Is it time to assess whether your company is operating efficiently while still being compliant with current regulations? The RoseRyan team can help.
How to Pitch an Angel Investor
After family and friends, startups tend to turn to angel investors to help them fund the company’s growth. To gain these investors’ trust and confidence, emerging growth companies need to make a stronger case for why an investment in the business would be worthwhile. Here is how to build up such a case.
Envision Your Needs Early On
Early on in the process, you are likely to find that a CFO can offer invaluable expertise, whether your young company has a CFO in place or needs a fractional CFO for occasional advice and guidance. This expert can, among many other responsibilities, help prepare and potentially present your startup’s pitch deck. Some entrepreneurs are comfortable doing this all on their own and may have success doing so, but there’s a perspective and expertise that an experienced CFO brings to the discussion with an angel investor that cannot be matched.
Having a CFO there when some of the tough questions get asked can be invaluable and could be the difference between an angel investor gaining full confidence in your company or leaving the meeting not being able to trust your claims. Questions about spending and controls around spending, future plans, and likelihood of future plans happening could be answered by the CFO expert, and the chief executive/founder could focus on addressing the value that the product, device, or service will bring to the marketplace.
While the profiles of angel investors vary greatly, along with their personalities, interests, and experience, go in with the assumption that they are savvy and will have probing questions about issues that may have eluded you until now. This is where the CFO can come in, to help make connections between the numbers that are being presented and the narrative you are sharing. CFOs can bridge the gap as they understand the language of both sides—both the angel investors and the senior leadership of the company—and they can help you avoid fend off uncomfortable questions early on by assessing your company and preparing it for investor scrutiny ahead of time.
Take Steps to Make Your Company Presentable, Trustworthy
Pursing angel investing is one step toward what will likely be a long journey of seeking financing. It’s great practice for eventually getting in front of bigger investors and becoming accustomed to talking about the company. But can you stand by your word? Do you have a clear understanding of the business today and how you are going to move it forward? Is your plan sound or simply hopeful? Strong records in place can help you better understand the business and also a strong foundation for the plan you are presenting to investors. Is it realistic and achievable in light of all that you know?
How to Pitch an Angel Investor
So, how do you go about finding and pitching angel investors? Networking and word of mouth are frequently the way in, and often board members and trusted advisors will be your best source for networking with angel investors. Ideally, you can get a warm introduction rather than trying to search around on your own and get over the hump of the initial reason an angel investor should give you some time in their Google calendar.
What should you include in your angel investor pitch deck, and how should you deliver it? All too often entrepreneurs want to pad their pitch deck with fluff, but investors are limited on time and will either see through the fluff or stop listening if they have to sit through a pitch that takes longer than an hour. Investors are looking for many things, and one of them is efficiency. Can you get to the point and do you know what you are talking about? A long, drawn-out presentation could indicate that you do not.
In fact just a handful of slides is all you need to get to the main points of your company and why the angel investor should invest—what your company stands for, its place in the marketplace, and the excitement that you and your employees and potentially customers have for all that is in store for your business.
Preparing for Angels: Is Your Company Ready?
The pace is fast when a company needs to pursue funding. In whatever time allows, trusted advisors with experience in successfully pitching investors can help you prepare, either by helping your company become “investor ready” or simply helping you with your presentation or carrying out the presentation for you. Being ready for the scrutiny is a big part of this task, and the process can take a lot longer than you may realize.
RoseRyan’s experts can help you save time, help you make connections, and make progress on pitching and winning over angel investors. Reach out today to learn more about how RoseRyan can help your startup.
Growth Strategies for Startups
High on the agenda of your startup is likely growth—you may have found this article when searching specifically for startup growth strategies. You have many options in front of you, depending on what you have in mind: such as organic growth, an acquisition, going public, hiring up, introducing a new product or service, branching out into a new location, and more. The growth strategy you pursue will depend on current resources, the future prospects of the company, and what’s happening in the marketplace. When there is so much to consider, it makes sense to turn to experts who can walk you through the many options and help you assess what your startup’s next steps toward growth should be.
Exploring a Startup Expansion Strategy and Growth Strategy
Is your company ready for the extensive changes that come with adopting a new growth strategy? You may find as you explore your growth options that what your company needs is to step back and build a stronger foundation to be able to withstand the transformation ahead—whether that’s bringing in a new team or becoming a publicly traded entity subject to the scrutiny of securities regulators and investors.
In some cases, as an emerging growth company starts to take off and a growth strategy appears to be feasible in the near future, it may take steps to operate more efficiently and to get a better sense of what is really going on in the business. After all, going outside the company for funding opportunities will subject the company to a level of scrutiny that it may not be ready to handle. To prepare the company for such changes, growth strategy consulting efforts could start with a focus on an outsourced accounting team and introduce best practices and ways of operating more efficiently, such as an efficient monthly close process and an accounting system with a proven tech stack of applications that meet the company’s current state of growth. These applications include the core accounting system (e.g., QuickBooks, Xero, or NetSuite), invoicing, expenses, payroll, equity management, and cash management.
These are back-office updates that may seem removed from the larger, more strategic changes ahead, but it’s a necessity to get right, so that the company will be operating smoothly and efficiently as it scales.
Discussing Startup Growth Strategies
Your trusted advisors can also help you think through potential growth strategies. Discussing the state of the business, along with your hopes for it, with finance and accounting consulting experts can determine what level of support and guidance is needed immediately—often companies like yours have grown so quickly that what they need most are processes and systems that match their pace and complexity today. For example, we helped a VC-backed emerging growth company set up its finance function starting with the day-to-day operations and provided CFO expertise on a part-time basis as our time with the company progressed. The CEO did not want to move too quickly. In other cases, a more hands-on approach by the RoseRyan team has been warranted when a company wants to make big changes, quickly, with eyes toward an eventual IPO or acquisition.
The fact is many layers are necessary in the financial foundation, as companies work toward advancing to the next level. Companies that come to us needing help in these areas of finance may not everything just yet. They can access expertise, as needed.
Putting Growth Strategies Into Action
As trusted advisors and emerging growth consultants, the RoseRyan team becomes an essential part of an VC-backed company’s business leadership process. Whether a company needs the expertise of just one consultant at this time or a dozen, we are here for our clients in every capacity, ready to help them reach their strategic growth goals. This may entail scenario planning or preparing the company for an exit strategy.
Our consultants have helped an extensive number of startups become more efficient and prepared for big changes. Their specialties range from payroll and general accounting to controllers and CFOs. They earned their accounting and finance chops in both corporate environments and at accounting firms, and their agility makes it seamless for them to jump in and help clients without missing a beat.
If your emerging growth company could benefit from financial expertise, more accurate financial reporting, and CFO-level insights, you could start by reaching out to RoseRyan to better understand your company’s strengths and weaknesses and what’s needed to move it toward the next level.
Expansionist Strategy: How to Prepare Your Startup for Bigger, Better Things
Very likely you have great plans for your emerging growth company—every great company leader/entrepreneur should. But how you get to that point and whether that end goal is realistic is another matter altogether. Growth strategy experts who have helped other companies assess and achieve their strategic goals bring a fresh perspective as they help you take your company to the next level. This work could be viewed as an expansionist strategy.
What Is Involved with Expansion Planning?
Companies can pursue growth and expand in various ways—by expansions in headcount, locations, product offerings, revenue, and more. Depending on your priority, these areas can be pursued deliberately and strategically (such as through organic growth) or quickly and still thoughtfully (an acquisition is a quicker way to expand but is not always a “perfect” route to do so).
Your expansion plan could begin by first truly understanding the end goal and then working back to build out the steps to get there. To be able to introduce a new product to market, for instance, does new talent need to be brought in, or do you need to lease new space or equipment to be able to produce it? Will you need to expand your marketing capabilities, to ensure this product release will be successful? Would interim or fractional marketing leadership be more advisable at this time then making full-time hires, for example?
At RoseRyan, we excel at helping companies scale—to find that balance between having the right level of resources, at the right time, without burning anyone out. Companies often need outside expertise to get this level just right as they plan out their expansion strategies.
Considerations When Developing an Expansion Plan
Here are some of the many areas to give thought to as you develop your expansion plan:
Company Expansion Strategies & Taking the Next Step
Growth strategy consultants can help you decide whether the moves you want to make are the right ones for the goals you have laid out for your company. It’s better to explore the pros and cons for certain changes rather than to regret them later. Acquisitions, for instance, that are not well thought out early on can take a bite out of a company’s long-term expansion strategic goals over time (e.g., if they lead to a talent exodus or the valuation tanks). Asking the tough questions, looking inward, and relying on the expertise of those who have gone through similar situations will ensure that the choices being made today are the best ones with all that you know about the company today and the market you operate in. Reach out to RoseRyan today to connect with a consultant who can help you with your growth efforts.
How to Find Out the Financial Health of a Company
Whether your company is on the hunt for a strategic acquisition or your private equity firm is looking for its next bolt-on purchase for a core portfolio company, you’re likely eager to look under the hood to see what’s really going on. Once you get past the initial interest of a company, you will want to understand its financial health—is it stable, is it profitable, does it have a future?
Assessing financial health involves more than reviewing any financial statements you can get your hands on—there are many factors to consider as you’re assessing a company’s financial health.
Financial Statements Are One Place to Start
The balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows give snapshots of the company at one point in time: You will want to know how much is it leveraged (balance sheet), how profitable it is (income statement), and whether its finance organization may be chaotic or operating efficiently (cash flow).
Is the company making good on its payments, or is it overwhelmed? Negative answers may not necessarily turn you off from a company—in fact it may show you that there’s room for improvement, understand the value your private equity firm could offer, and it may give you some room at the negotiation table.
What does the balance sheet really say about a company?
By showing a company’s assets and liabilities, in addition to shareholders’ equity, the balance sheet provides a window into how the business has built itself up and what it owes others. Many believe it’s here, in the balance sheet, that you can get a key indication of a company’s financial position. Has it taken on too much debt, and is that insurmountable to overcome considering what it’s bringing in?
How should you read a company’s income statement?
Also known as the profit and loss statement, or P&L the income statement is where you’ll find the company’s earnings.
What should you make of a company’s cash flow statement?
Cash is king, and it’s a key indicator of a company’s ability to stay solvent. Are the company able to stay on top of what it’s owed, does the finance team have good visibility into their cash situation? While growth potential may be top of mind when scrutinizing a company, the cash flow will indicate how the company is operating and whether it can continue.
Other Areas to Review When Assessing a Company’s Financial Health
A financial health assessment should look at both the strengths and weaknesses of a company—this is how you can determine how efficient it’s run, whether its valuation matches your view, and how much potential this company could have in light of your assumption about it.
At RoseRyan, we look closely at 16 essential areas of finance for startups. A series of questions reveals critical information about the company’s operations and financial management, including its growth plans, concerns about competition, partnerships, whether its systems have kept up with the growing business, and its financial obligations.
What’s missing? What has management overlooked? How important are these to you and your own plans for expanding upon a company you have invested in or your own company? How much can you help with the resources and skills you have access to, or do you need to expand on the expertise you have within arm’s reach?
How to assess the financial health of a company?
Assessments and evaluations early on can save you from surprises and problems later on. RoseRyan can help you think through these strategic issues for a company you are reviewing or reviewing your company and pinpoint where room for improvement is evident. Reach out to learn more about our financial health assessments.
Mid-year reality check: how to adjust your course of action for the rest of 2023
If you’ve ever made New Year’s resolutions, you’ll know things never quite go to plan.
Unexpected challenges and variables—both external and internal—can affect our goals and priorities. And sometimes one may feel stuck, or overwhelmed by the need to pivot and adapt to changes going on around us.
That’s why it’s important to regularly take some time to reflect, reassess, and recalibrate our actions and strategies—using fresh eyes to look at all the angles.
Old habits die hard, and fear of the unknown can be crippling
We’re six months into 2023, are you currently where you expected to be across your priorities? Does something need to be adjusted, but can’t put your finger on exactly what? Is something holding you back from taking action because of concerns about a needed course correction, perhaps, grappling with how changes might impact you or your organization?
It’s easy to get complacent and stuck in a rut of just going through the motions, checking boxes to feel accomplished… only to realize something is incomplete or not working, and that things need some shaking up.
And when a situation is challenging, it’s common to continue to do what feels easy, pushing forward in auto-pilot mode with what we think works according to our typical patterns and routines, and hoping for the best—or for something different to magically happen that will address the obstacles showing up. But…
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.” ~ Jessie Potter
What to change? What to let go?
Circumstances are likely different than when you launched into this year: what was important in January might not be as crucial in June and the rest of the year.
You may need to find ways to be more efficient and cost-effective in your business activities, but you could be struggling with the question of whether to keep doing the same things, or to cut everything and worry later.
You might be wondering how you can streamline, yet still get the essential information needed to establish a new baseline and quickly reconfigure, keeping the minimum accounting, reporting and analysis required to still support a growing business.
How can you get over the hump and fearlessly tackle necessary evolution?
This is an ideal time to be strategic and do some conscious stock-taking—to do a timely mid-year assessment of long term prospects and projects, and update your views on possible solutions.
As you head into the second half of the year, be willing to obtain independent feedback and consider different perspectives to establish some new checks and balances and quickly get clarity that allows for survival in the present, while you continue moving forward.
Now is the right time to be open to new insights and be bold about tackling change. You should:
No time like the present: take charge of the future now!
If the last time you did a stock take of your situation was when the year felt fresh and full of promise to strategize a new direction, a mid-year check in session might be just what’s needed to help you re-evaluate your progress and adjust your plans for the rest of the year.
Are you willing to embrace change and set a new baseline to renew your trajectory and reestablish a foundation for strong growth and continue to thrive?
No matter where your organization is in its journey, this annual halfway mark is a valuable opportunity to get clarity, confidence, and momentum for the second part of the year. Whether you need a small tweak or a major pivot, RoseRyan’s finance and accounting experts can jump in to help you and your organization take stock and make the best decisions to stay on track.
Get in touch to talk through what you require, or book your rapid assessment session with us now.
Wishing you all the best for whatever the remainder of 2023 may bring: seize the day!
Summer is upon us! How you can keep productivity up at work this summer
It’s natural to feel a bit less productive at work during the summer. Nice weather, vacations, children at home, etc.: There are a lot of things that compete for our attention and energy at this time of year.
A dip in productivity could also happen because your bosses, co-workers, clients and vendors are likely taking their vacation time too.
Here are some ways you can boost your work productivity this summer:
RoseRyan can’t help you plan your “Ideal Vacation”. But, we can help you with augmenting and supporting your team, or taking on outsourced project work that just isn’t getting done during this more relaxed season.
Take a look at some of the ways our team can help you make 2023 summer the best ever, at work, and at play!
Seeking Funding When You Have a Small Network
If you’re involved in growing a business from the ground up, you likely understand the significance of the old adage: “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” But what if your network is still limited?
As a founder and entrepreneur seeking funding you may have discovered that before you can grow your business, you need to grow your network. And when your list of contacts is not much longer than your friends and family members—partly because you’ve been heads-down building your business for some time now—it’s a challenge to find, attract, and get introductions to potential investors.
Join RoseRyan’s president, David Roberson, in this live presentation hosted on May 22nd, 2023 by 1BusinessWorld to discuss how to seek funding when you have a small network. This guidance is supported by RoseRyan’s 30 years experience working with hundreds of VC-backed companies.
Here are some of the areas that Dave will be exploring:
Keep Calm in Chaos: How to Cope with Building a Successful Business
But these dreams of independence and success don’t come without hurdles: the numbers also show that roughly 20% of small businesses fail during their first year; and that those responsible for building companies from the ground up are 50% more likely than non-entrepreneurs to report having mental health conditions.
Whether you’re a business owner—or C-suite executive charged with steering a growing company—the challenges are many.
The most common problems experienced by early- to mid-stage businesses being poor cash flow, competition, taxes, an uncertain economy, and growing a business. Underneath these more obvious issues are other important factors, including a lack of company structure and organization; and entrepreneurs and company managers not being adequately prepared to take on all the responsibilities that come with running a business.
It’s clear then that being responsible for establishing and growing a business can be a demanding and stressful task that can lead to overwhelm and anxiety. If you can relate, here are some tips to help you stay calm and on track as you navigate through the potential choppy waters of leading a company to success:
Turn to RoseRyan when you need:
Read our strategic project overview to find out how RoseRyan’s Finance and Accounting experts can provide support and shoulder necessary finance tasks so you can focus on high-priority projects and expanding your business.
See how RoseRyan put its expertise to use in some case studies that showcase just a few of the more than 1,500 organizations that have trusted RoseRyan to help solve their Finance and Accounting management challenges, and take their businesses to the next level.
*Source: https://findstack.com/resources/entrepreneur-statistics/
What Got Auditors’ Attention This Year?
Every SOX audit season reveals a bit of information about auditors’ expectations. And every year, those expectations seem to shift, with not much transparency about where the bar is. So, preparing for auditors’ scrutiny often involves frustration and scrambling as companies try to comply with ever-changing auditor expectations. Fortunately, we didn’t get any big surprises this year and what we did see indicates the areas of focus we can expect to see again:
Management review controls: Auditors are looking for evidence that (a) reviewers understand what they are reviewing, and (b) the review was performed at an appropriate level—with supporting documentation attached.
A third party should be able to determine how the reviewer performed the review—what they tied out, what supporting documents they looked at, what calculations they reperformed, how they concluded that the data included was complete and accurate, and how any estimates and assumptions were supported (i.e., what contrary evidence was evaluated, what sensitivity analysis were performed, etc.). Of course, not all these steps are necessary for every review, but any time you have a complex report or an area where there is significant judgment involved, there’s higher risk—and the more robust the review procedures should be.
User access reviews: Companies should regularly revisit their processes to ensure access reviews are up-to-date and comprehensive. Anyone doing these reviews needs to have a clear understanding of what the various roles mean in terms of who can access what and what they are permitted to do when they have that access. It’s especially important to pay attention to customized roles and whether any segregation-of-duties conflicts open up when new access permissions are created. (For more insights on user access controls, see where deficiencies may be found during an audit and how to avoid or mitigate them.)
Segregation of duties: Usually a big—and necessary—undertaking, this analysis typically only needs to be performed on an annual basis, so long as you have strong access controls and not a lot of changes going on. Ideally, you should conduct your annual review close to your year-end, and then monitor for changes throughout the subsequent year.
Are you recovering from a rough SOX audit? Need help remediating material weaknesses? Or is it time for a review of your controls? RoseRyan SOX compliance experts can help year-round, so reach out anytime.