Risk Averse Is The Biggest Risk Of All

Let me tell you about a company I’m working with. For confidentiality let’s call them Blueberry Hill for this blog post. Blueberry has five Directors and make decisions on a consensual basis. They are all hitting their fifties and when I first went to see them they all had a shared ambition to exit in three to five years time. But (and this was a big but), they had no plans to grow the business in a way that would enable them to realise that shared dream. Why? Because they were risk averse and their product offerings had consequently grown stale. They thought they were swimming hard but they were just treading water.

I sat down with them, and they talked me through how they wanted to realise X million out of the business. Then I talked them through how, on their current growth path, they were not going to get anywhere near achieving their dreams. 

Expanding horizons

That got their attention. Now they were interested enough to spend some time and energy thinking creatively. Thinking about what else they could do, what they could change, how they could capture more market share and crucially how they could engineer an increase in profitability. That led to a really fascinating session where they moved radically into widening their horizon from Business to Business commerce to include the Business to Consumer sector. That was new for them!

Blueberry Hill is now well on the way to taking those guys to the place they always dreamed about. That's the difference sitting down for a chat with a creative Financial Director can make.

Fancy a chat, FD Centre style?

Ali

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The Brilliant FD Development Days

I just love something which I started up this year and keeps getting better: The FD Development Day which happens every month. On the day itself we bring all the Thames Valley FD Centre FDs together to keep them up to speed with latest developments whilst earning some handy CPE points (Continued Professional Education) along the way. We get a good mix of top quality accountants, tax experts and lawyers to come in each month and a variation of other experts in fields such as insurance, pensions, marketing and sales.

We also have a slot that we all really enjoy which is when one of our own FD team talks about an area where he or she particularly excels – we all love that slot the best. So maybe an FD will talk about how he has introduced strong Key Performance Indicators into a business, how he went about identifying those KPI's and then demonstrate the reports he’s put in place and the value he’s added for his client. Another guy is a strong strategist and he had a great time talking about how he has helped a company evolve their own strategy. It gives the other FD's the confidence to go and do the same things themselves and it’s one of the ways we are continually looking to add value into those business's we serve. We don't want to stagnate as an organisation so this keeps us FD's up to date with what’s happening in the industry and brings new ideas of how we can add value for our clients.

This week it's being hosted by Shaw Gibbs of Oxford and as well as the usual tax and accounting update we're looking at how we can maximise the company value for our I.T. clients and also how businesses can benefit hugely from using a content provision service for their Social Media Optimisation (SMO) campaigns.

For me, a great FD Centre strong point will always be that there are over one hundred FD's across the network, so we’ll frequently get emails flying around saying “Does anybody know about this or that software issue?” and asking each other advice on all sorts of trends. So by getting to know each other, the Thames Valley FD's effectively give each client the collective brainpower of over 100 FD's nationwide!

Ali

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