Consulting

What Services Do I Provide?

I assist Small and Medium Businesses with their debt financing requirements and strategic planning projects.

Typical projects include:

  • Obtaining additional financing facilities for growth requirements. This may be with your existing financiers or with new financiers.
  • Assistance with review, renewal or restructure of finance facilities with existing lenders. [Since the Global Financial Crisis, businesses have discovered that renewal of existing facilities is not automatic no matter how long they have been with their financiers.]
  • Assistance with business turnaround strategies, including negotiating with and obtaining continued support from financiers and as necessary, the due diligence accountants or other advisors appointed by the financier(s).
  • Assistance in strategic business planning; in particular in developing 3-way financial forecast models that enable stress-testing of business strategies.

Equity Raising: As an Accredited Sponsor of the Australian Small Scale Offerings Board, I also assist Australian businesses with raising equity from investors. Please refer to Equity Raising for more details on this.

How Do You Benefit From Working With Me?

My approach in any debt financing project is to achieve 2 objectives:

  1. To quickly and efficiently get the right type of financing for your immediate business requirements
  2. To establish the foundations for strong supportive long term relationships with your financiers, regardless of how many changes in bank managers you have.

My aim is thus to work myself out of a job with you after the initial project. You should only require my services thereafter because:

  • you and your team are so busy that you need to outsource the work for preparing the finance review or application for additional financing facilities
  • you have an ‘out-of-the-box’ financing requirement where my expertise can help you get the best outcome
  • you want the benefits of having an independent business advisor as a sounding board at regular “working ON the business” reviews

What Do I Do For You?

I work with you to:

  • tailor the right financing solutions that help you achieve your business goals and meets credit requirements
  • prepare a financing proposal package for presentation to banks. This is in essence a credit submission. It builds the strengths of your business case from a credit perspective

How the facts about your business are presented can make a difference between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ by a financier, especially if you have a complex business structure or special requirements (known as “exception to credit policy” in banker parlance).

It’s about half cup full vs half cup empty. It is not about ‘spinning’ or trying to ‘fluff’ around issues. If I identify potential business or credit issues, we can work out mitigating or rectification strategies before approaching financiers. This process helps improve your business as well as your credit-worthiness.

You have the benefit of my years of experience as senior banker for large privately-owned businesses. Their business financing requirements often required lateral thinking to develop solutions that give them what they needed and at the same time met the hurdle of sound credit disciplines.

The ability to build a sound credit case is critical where a business is in turnaround mode and has been classified as a “problem account” by the bank.

You have the benefit of my experience in working in the “bad bank”, managing financing relationships for businesses in turnaround situation as well as in insolvency and litigation.

Why Should You Work With Me?

You may be thinking: “But aren’t you doing what my bank manager is supposed to do? Why should I use your services?”

Here are the benefits of my approach:

  • it speeds up the approval process. Your time-poor bank manager can ‘cut-and-paste’ the information into internal bank forms. This minimises the amount of to-ing and fro-ing with more questions and requests for further information.
  • any potential issues that could cause concerns to the credit approval people are identified and mitigated in your proposal.
  • it establishes a detailed understanding of your business on your credit file at the bank. This saves you time and hassle having to explain your business every time you have a change in bank managers.

Read Case Studies & Testimonials that demonstrate the effectiveness of my approach.

How Do You And I Work Together?

Contact me for a free no-obligation 30 minute consultation about your business plans and your financing requirements.

If we both agree that my services will be of value to your requirements, I will provide you with an Information Request List together with a Scope of Works and Fee Agreement.

The aim is for both of us to be as efficient as possible on a project. It saves time and keeps project costs down.

How Much Does It Cost?

Project charges are based on a daily rate (minimum half-day charge) and a success fee.
Success fees do not apply on advisory services which do not involve financing.

Contact me for a free no-obligation 30 minute consultation about your business plans and financing requirements.