At Saward Dawson we understand smaller business owners and for-purpose organisations because we work with them every day.
Businesses
We know that owners are working very hard and want to be improving their financial stability and profitability
Business is about strategic planning, making tough calls based on partial information, and building markets.
Monthly profit and loss statements and a balance sheet don’t really tell the full story of how your operation is tracking, where problems or opportunities lie, and they certainly have nothing to say about the likely future you are facing.
Emerging trends for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are:
- Risk management – Structured and systematic identification of risks at four levels: Strategy, Operations, Finance and Legal conformity. We can work with you to identify risks in your business and devise ways to mitigate them.
- Succession in family businesses needs several years of planning before the owner/current leader steps away from daily operations.
- Finding hidden costs and helping eliminate them.
- Accessing your professional advisor’s network.
For-purpose organisations
We know that for-purpose executives are working hard with limited resources to control costs and ensure best use of every dollar that passes through their organisations.
The NDIS and Aged Care sectors are undergoing rapid change and mounting challenges, with greater regulation and government funding reduction in real terms. Changing business models, lack of fully integrated IT systems, and difficulties finding enough high quality staff have all become business as usual.
We have specialists in NDIS, Aged Care, and data management that understand your challenges and can deliver high-value results very quickly.
Specific Services
At Saward Dawson we have a great combination of deep technical expertise and extensive hands on CFO experience in our staff and can assist you with:
- A one day CFO Health Check on your organisation, with recommendations for improvement.
- An Interim CFO while you recruit, making improvements in consultation with the CEO.
- Working Capital Management.
- Performance Reporting.
- Product Costing.
- Developing a better process for preparation of your Annual Budget and/or managing the process for you.
- Implementing a Rolling Forecast for 12 or 18 months and teaching your staff how to keep it up to date.
- Product Costing / Profitability compared to industry or sector benchmarks.
- Advice on Finance Team roles & structure.
We can recommend a team structure for the current size of your business or a structure you can grow into, along with relevant position descriptions.
- Finance Process Optimisation, including Process Automation where possible
Our experience conducting audits along with the software tools we use to record processes enable us to document your current systems and recommend changes to reduce time and cost while ensuring appropriate review and approval of costs and payments.
We have skilled IT staff who are able to automate many of the processes which are currently performed manually by staff, providing both time and cost savings.
- A Virtual CFO, giving monthly reviews of performance & helping devise and implement improvements.
A growing number of smaller enterprises are utilising vCFOs because:
- They need the expertise that a CFO provides, but they don’t need it full-time.
- Resource constraints make hiring a qualified in-house CFO impossible.
- Unlike a new hire, professional vCFOs are used to jumping into a business mid-stream, so the time it takes for your investments in that role to yield results is 1-3 months instead of 6-12.
- Unbiased, impartial advice is a hallmark of the vCFO. Unlike an in-house staffer, vCFOs make decisions based on data and expertise. Their singular agenda is to make your organization sustainable and successful.
- They value meeting regularly to review what’s been done to implement the strategic plan and prioritise the next steps.
