Strategic Planning Services
Many small businesses are owner-managed and time constraints mean it can be a challenge to strategically plan for future growth of the company. This is where our team excels and provides real added value. With a thorough understanding of your business finances, we offer strategic planning services that map out a clear direction for your business and set achievable goals to help get you there.
With many years’ experience helping numerous clients plan for the future, we know how to help you. We understand that identifying where you currently are, and where you want to get to, is the key to developing a strategic action plan. Personal and business plans come hand in hand of course and we can help to ensure both remain on track.
Whether you aim to expand, release capital or plan an exit, our strategy service helps you consider the options and formulate a written plan. Regular follow-up ensures this is consistently reviewed and action is taken to help you achieve your goals.
Our strategic planning service includes four key areas:
1) Exit Strategy and Succession Planning
The sale of your business is likely to be one of the most important transactions you will ever make – requiring quality advice and planning to realise the best value. It can be one of the most difficult decisions for an entrepreneur who has spent years building up their business.
At HWB, we have many years’ experience of dealing with sales and transfers of business, including developing an exit strategy or succession planning. We can help you groom your business to achieve the best possible price and plan well in advance to maximise your return. We will assess your processes, ownership structure, and ensure a smooth transition to help fund your next venture.
Timing is crucial. Consideration of market conditions and the position of the business on its growth curve is key.
Our expert team can help to structure a deal that is tax efficient and provides maximum benefit to you, your family and your employees. Your options may include one of the following:
- Selling your share of the business to co-owners or partners
- Selling your business to employees
- Selling your business to a third party
- Passing on your business to children or family members
Perhaps your long-term plan has always been to pass the business on to the next generation and you are looking to implement a smooth handover that you are comfortable with. We can help provide a workable succession plan to transfer equity and offer advice on the right structure for the future.
Whichever your choice, it is important to include your exit strategy as part of your strategic plan and review it annually.
2) Improving the value of your business
First and foremost, we are business people. We know and understand how to run and develop a business.
We have devised an evaluation and action process that is easy to understand and will lead to a clear plan of how to increase the value of your business.
The first step is to value your business now. This acts as a benchmark and helps quantify the increase in future value. Addressing the issue of increased capital value is not only motivating, it also provides a genuine opportunity to make significant improvements to the business.
In many cases, an indication of the value of your business is based upon a multiple maintainable EBITDA (earnings before interest and tax, depreciation and amortisation).
For privately-owned businesses the multiple will depend on several factors including:
- The industry sectors
- Where the business is in its lifecycle (developing, mature, decline)
- Dependency on any particular individual or customer
- The quality of the management team
Once an indication of the value has been established, we then explore the areas which need to be improved and address these with you in a series of workshops. This information is then converted into an action plan with deadlines and responsibilities.
3) Planning for the future
We work closely with you to formulate a clear and definite business strategy for long-term business success. Knowing exactly where your business is now, and where you want to be strategically in the future, is key to the planning process.
With our commercial acumen and skills we will help you improve your profitability and efficiency, assess risks and ultimately achieve your business goals.
Our specialist workshops, led by one of our trained facilitators, will enable you to clarify the vision for the future of your business and help you formulate a detailed action plan of how this can be achieved.
The benefits:
- Provides directors, owners and key individuals with the opportunity of meeting away from the office with no interruptions
- Allows freedom to exchange views and offer suggestions for the way forward
- Identifies the key issues
- Ensures that there is agreement on the order of priority of what needs to be done and how this will be achieved
- Provides a concise action plan to address the key issues
- Provides an easy-to-read report outlining all the views and suggestions made
- Delivers an action plan to move forward
4) Improving efficiency and removing waste
Research has shown that many businesses can reduce their costs by as much as 20% yet don’t invest the time to identify how these savings can be made.
Our efficiency improvement process will enable you to tackle the waste issue head on, make savings on costs and deliver straight to your bottom line.
Working hand in hand with one of our trained facilitators we will identify areas of your business where savings can be made without reducing the performance of the business.
These are the seven most common causes of waste in any organisation:
- Over-production and, for the service industry, over-servicing
- Waiting – delay in action
- Transporting – the production process as well as movement of materials and products
- Inappropriate processing – the wrong people doing the right job or even the wrong people doing the wrong job!
- Unnecessary stock and work in progress
- Inefficient processes
- Defects – get it right first time
HWB-facilitated workshops with the key team assess these seven areas and identify where waste is occurring in your business.
These areas are then prioritised to achieve the maximum benefit and an action plan is formulated to drive the process to its conclusion.
Continued focus
Our team has extensive experience in providing strategic planning advice at different stages of your business lifecycle, whether it be growing, diversifying, creating succession strategies, or to eventually exit the business when you are ready.
We will monitor your business finances continually, providing regular strategic advice in helping to improve your business performance. Maintaining a strategic focus is vital to success.
Most businesses are continually being challenged and threatened, but with clear strategic planning you can maintain the focus, control and motivation required to achieve growth. A strategic plan is not a document that sits on the shelf and ignored, it is a live and working plan that is continually changing.
For more information about our strategic planning services, please contact James Flood on 023 8046 1244.
Capitalise from our specialist knowledge
An insider’s knowledge can deliver significant advantages, so why not benefit from our exceptional degree of technical expertise in a number of specialist sectors.
Got a business challenge?
We have the answers.
Let’s Talk
Why not arrange a FREE consultation and find out what we can do for your business.