We Help You to Manage Your Business to Greater Success
We work to help you to significantly improve the financial position of your business.
We have the qualifications, as well as years of experience in businesses of all sizes and in different sectors. And we have several guiding principles:
Finance Experts Make a Difference - The reason Charis FD was started was a fundamental belief in the value of financial expertise - based solidly on first rate accountancy and business qualifications and continuing professional development, but consolidated and enhanced with sharp end experience in business. We’ve seen these improvements over and over again. We know that finance experts make a difference in business.
Finance Experts are Not Just For Big Companies - The other reason Charis FD was started was that this kind of expertise and experience has historically been largely only affordable to large and successful corporations. Smaller businesses often simply can’t afford to have a full time Finance Director, but ironically they are normally the ones that need the most help in getting the finances straight to enable them to carry on growing. We wanted to give smaller businesses access to finance and business management expertise and experience at a fraction of the cost of employing a full time Finance Director or CFO, and a fraction of the cost of engaging the big consultancy firms.
Hands-On in Partnership With You - We are not just management consultants who come and give a bit of advice, hand over a report, and then leave you to implement (or not) their recommendations. We’re not knocking consultants. It’s just not what we do! We want to build a long-term working relationship with you, in which we can both give advice and take some of the burden of financial management away.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All - We don’t have a pre-developed programme. We are more flexible than that. We have frameworks that we work within, yes - frameworks learned from years of experience in bigger companies and exposure to big consulting firms. But they are just frameworks, something to work within without forgetting the essentials and the ultimate objectives, rather than rigid process models to follow. Because our expertise comes from really doing this in real businesses over many years, we have a more eclectic approach, having learned for ourselves what works and what doesn’t.
Keep The Ultimate Goal in Mind At All Times - We drive everything we do with you from a clear business vision and objectives. We want to help you to be successful financially, and confident in managing your business.
The Business Performance Management Wheel - This is our framework for talking about financial and business management. It looks like this:
Business performance keeps moving and gathering momentum through:
Strategy and Planning - Know where you want to go and how you plan to get there.
Actions and Change - Do the things you planned and make changes to increase the value of the business.
Performance - The results of the actions you take is the performance of the business - good or bad. Includes profit.
Performance Review and Feedback - Review and analyse how the business has performed, regularly, against key indicators in the plan. And complete the loop by revising actions plans and taking decisions to improve performance.
The wheel is set in a positive environment of:
Risk Management and Compliance - Make sure the business is controlled to mitigate risks.
Stakeholder Management - Manage external parties in the right way: Shareholders, lenders, bankers, lawyers, auditors, suppliers, customers, etc.
And at the centre, keeping the whole thing turning, is:
Finance - Your financial resources, split into three aspects:
People - the Finance team, which needs managing and developing;
Processes and systems - the finance procedures people use and the tools they use to operate them;
Cash - the fuel of the business (if you run out, the wheel stops turning and the business stops).
We work to help you to significantly improve the financial position of your business:
- Increasing your profits;
- Improving your cashflow and cash balances;
- Giving you confidence in your strategic plans and financial plans;
- Keeping your shareholders and lenders happy and confident in your ability to manage the finances;
- Giving you confidence that your Finance team is functioning properly;
- Giving you assurance that the business is running smoothly.
Next, you might like to find out a little bit more about me, Andrew Burrows, and my background and experience. Click here to find out more. Or see some of our case studies. Or leap straight in and look at our services.