Cash-flow & financial challenges? Urgent & Pressing Issues? Lack of Financial Skills In-House? We can help. We bring almost two decades of hands-on financial skills and leadership, delivered in a practical and straight-forward manner. One of the most sought after deliverables of The R2 Group is our forecasting deliverable. We develop a month-by-month forecast which incorporates the income statement, balance sheet and cash-flow statement to portray the financial results of the organization’s operating choices, and easily performs a what-if analysis to help ensure your organization has the liquidity it needs to survive and thrive. This in turn can be used to strengthen the core business through more robust insight of the cost structure and revenue drivers.
Management needs information it can count on; reliable info that accurately portrays profitability by customer or product line or geography; info that accurately portrays the organization’s true cost structure; info that allows us as managers to assess and mitigate risks, plan our liquidity and reach our business and personal goals. Often times the quantity and quality of that info needs to be made more robust—and that is where The R2 Group comes in. We can deliver results, timely and in a cost-effective manner. Sometimes that’s strictly on a project basis to help implement systems and upgrade processes and to train your existing staff. Sometimes it’s using our Fractional CFO resources to allow us to play the CFO role on a part-time, but ongoing basis. Either way, our services allow you to reach your goals.
Develop and Align Business and Financial Strategies
If you have an unwritten strategic plan we have a great tool to get it in writing—and to make it succinct: literally one-page. This can give you added confidence in dealing with your management team, board and bankers—and allows a real and constant focus of finding ways to improve profits and cash-flow. We can incorporate your vision and mission and create, with you, tools to keep your team accountable to the plan—and to make it a living document that doesn’t get left on the bookshelf—but instead worked and reviewed on a regular basis. This tool allows immediate awareness of the logic in the plan—and if we’ve covered all the bases to make the vision a reality. We also assist in ensuring the business strategies have sound financial targets—and model the ways in which the business plan can be financed. We also assist in aligning those with your budgeting process, in a way that ensures alignment and accountability to the most important goals of the organization. For some clients, we assist on an annual basis in developing and implementing these plans. For others we participate on a monthly basis as part of the accountability process.
Create and Implement Growth and Recovery (“Turnaround”) Plans
Regardless if it is a recovery or turnaround plan that needs created and implemented during the down economic times, or a growth plan, both situations require examining where we are now versus where we want to be. It requires diligence in understanding our detailed cost structure, understanding the range of variability in both our revenues and our costs, and having the ability to implement the plans. We assist organizations in developing and implementing these plans with an eye not only for the impact to the income statement, but also to the balance sheet and the impact to cash flows. We’ve dealt with many client situations that are tough, but solvable—and we keep a cool head with a diligent approach.
Forecast Cash Flow and Key Financial Drivers
Understanding cash flows, as well as the key financial drivers which impact both cash and other financial objectives, is critical for any organization, regardless of their stage (start-up, expansion, professionally managed, professionally planned). We can create a five-year (or shorter), month-by-month fully-integrated forecast model in Excel®, which will include the Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Cash Flow Statement, plus analytics and compliance testing with your loan covenants. You’ll know, based on reflecting the business plan in this model, your cash needs, credit-line limits, excess cash or cash needs for each time period. This tool allows us to model “what-if” scenarios and impacts from various strategies—a tool that gives you real understanding of the financial impacts of decisions. Many small and medium-sized organizations haven’t had the luxury of using a tool like this—and we now can make it happen for them on a cost-effective basis.
Fractional CFO
The purpose of the Fractional CFO is to allow you to have the resources of a well-qualified CFO on your staff for a fraction of the cost of a full-time employee. We’ll become your CFO and spend one to several days per month on site, depending upon your needs. This allows us to bring our experience to you with the goal of improving your profits and cash-flows by focusing on activities that a full-time CFO would, such as assisting in pricing decisions, understanding your true cost structure and looking for ways to reduce costs. We work with you and your team, your banker, suppliers and customers to implement strategies and practices that are professional, sound and geared toward accomplishing your goals.
Develop Debt and Equity Funding Strategies
The goal of corporate finance is to find the right type and amount of financing, being either debt or equity. We’ll work with you and develop cash-flow plans, identify financing sources to fit your specific need, negotiate the terms with the lenders, and put controls and procedures in place to meet the ongoing relationship requirements. Your job as the leader of the organization is to paint the picture of where you want to take the organization in order to capitalize on its strengths and market opportunities. Our job is to help you get the debt and/or equity you need to make those plans a reality.
Assess and Mitigate Risk Scenarios
It doesn’t take long in today’s environment to know there are significant risks in forecasting even something as short-term as next month’s sales. We assess risk for the leading drivers of your financial performance and develop mitigation plans for a number of different outcomes. Having thought through these scenarios ahead of time you are well-prepared to quickly execute and either reduce the downside from the worst-case scenarios, or be ready to put in place the resources needed to capitalize on your up-side potential. We bring expertise and perspective, as well as practical tools, to look objectively at the risks facing your organization and develop plans that are practical and effective in their implementation.
Acquisitions and Divestitures
Creating value via acquisitions works well when they are properly integrated. We can bring value in assisting on the analysis of the acquisition and performing due diligence to deal structuring and financing. We also bring tools and methods to quickly integrate the acquisition to ensure it brings the success and results everyone anticipated. We also can assist divesting of a division or unit of your organization when it no longer fits in your strategic plan—while allowing you to focus on growing the remaining business.
Accounting
Whether it is an upcoming Review or Audit of your GAAP financial statements, or a concern over internal controls, we assist companies in getting ready for their outside CPA services. We do this when internal resources are lacking, or as a cost-effective way to reduce the audit fee by having more of the work done in-house. We also assist organizations that need to adopt GAAP statements (often in preparation for a buyout), or when more sophisticated statements are needed to obtain larger amounts of debt or equity financing.