Well it’s true. But so often when a business grows, it finds that sales are increasing but profit margin reduces and overheads increase. How do you stop that from happening?

The focus has to be on developing those sales which bring in better profit, removing loss making activities from the business and controlling costs through increasing efficiency.

Collaborative specialises in helping growing businesses determine where those areas are, formulating the change management strategy and then working alongside the management team to implement it.

The business owners we work with are entrepreneurs – which generally means they’re great at building businesses, but don’t have the time to carefully plan how to manage change.

When a company is constantly changing, either because it’s growing or because things aren’t as good as they used to be, it can be tempting to throw resource, time and money into fixing the situation. This can be so costly to a business with limited resources.

It is essential to manage the change in a controlled, calculated way. That’s where Collaborative steps in. We are experts in managing and controlling change. We will identify the limiting factors, the areas which need improvement, and carefully plan how you can get from where you are now to where you need to be.

We hear this quite a lot from our clients. They know they need more control but haven’t got time themselves to continually analyse figures and review their financial performance.

That’s where good processes can help support the MD of a growing business. When the company is changing it can be difficult to dedicate time to making things more efficient. The easiest thing to do is “throw resource at it”. But this can be dangerous, leading to increased costs and reduced cash flow.

Collaborative have years of experience in making people and systems work together to increase efficiency. Cost control isn’t always about the obvious – it’s about getting the best value out of what you have so that when you grow, you don’t increase your costs.

We have found that those business owners who better understand their financial results build more profitable businesses.

We provide finance training and mentoring to business owners and their teams which is tailored to their specific requirements. The training courses can be delivered in-house or we can construct e-learning finance training which is geared to your organisation. Each of our courses is developed by experienced finance directors who have been instrumental in turning companies around, which always involves guiding and mentoring their teams.

It is imperative that before embarking on a business development or profit improvement programme to identify which areas of the business can make you the most profit – now and long term.

If you don’t, then you could be spending an awful lot of money investing in areas which give you low return. This is what leads to some companies seeing turnover increase, but profit standing still or at worst declining.

Collaborative specialises in analysing financial and market information to identify key profit areas and knowing how to turn that knowledge into a profit improvement strategy.