Business Consulting

Buying an existing business means buying its customers, its systems, and its reputation — along with its problems.

We help you evaluate what's actually for sale. That means reviewing financial statements and tax returns for the last several years and checking whether the reported numbers reconcile with the bank deposits. It means understanding why the owner is really selling, how dependent the business is on that owner personally, and what happens to revenue when they leave. It means assessing customer concentration, supplier relationships, lease terms, and staff retention risk.

We also work through the structural decisions: whether to buy shares or assets (the tax consequences differ substantially for buyer and seller, and the two sides usually want opposite things), how to value the business, how to structure payment, and what to insist on in the purchase agreement.

Most owners start thinking about selling about six months before they want to be gone. The ones who get good prices started two or three years earlier.

Preparation is most of the work: clean books that a buyer's advisor can verify, revenue that isn't dependent on the owner's personal relationships, documented systems, resolved legal and tax issues, and a realistic understanding of what the business is worth versus what the owner feels it's worth.

We also help with the tax side, which is where a large fraction of the proceeds is won or lost. The lifetime capital gains exemption can shelter a substantial amount on a qualifying share sale — but qualifying requires the corporation to meet specific tests, and meeting them sometimes requires restructuring well before the sale.

New businesses fail for boring reasons far more often than dramatic ones: no cash flow model, no separation between business and personal finances, no idea of the break-even point, and a structure chosen without thinking about it.

We help at the start with the things that are cheap to do right and expensive to fix later: choosing between sole proprietorship, partnership, and incorporation; setting up proper books and separate accounts from day one; registering for the tax accounts you'll need; building a realistic cash flow projection; and understanding what your first year of tax obligations actually looks like.

Growth is not the same thing as more revenue. Plenty of businesses grow their way into a cash crisis.

We work through where growth would actually come from — more customers, higher prices, more per customer, or new lines — and which of those your business is positioned to do. We look at unit economics: what it costs you to acquire a customer and what that customer is worth over time, because if the first number exceeds the second, growth makes things worse rather than better.

We also look at capacity and financing. Growth consumes cash before it produces it, and the timing gap is where otherwise healthy businesses run into trouble.

Marketing advice at the strategic level, not campaign execution.

That means being specific about who your customer actually is rather than who you'd like them to be, defining what makes you the obvious choice for that person, and choosing a small number of channels you can sustain rather than a presence everywhere that you maintain nowhere.

For professional services in particular, we look at referral systems, community and diaspora networks, positioning, and how to build a reputation that generates inbound enquiries. We also look at whether the marketing budget is producing anything measurable, which is a question a surprising number of businesses can't answer.

Restructuring covers a wide range: incorporating a growing sole proprietorship, reorganizing share structure for family income splitting or a future sale, adding or removing a partner, separating a valuable asset from operating risk through a holding company, or reworking operations in a business that is losing money.

Some of it is opportunity-driven and some of it is pressure-driven. Both benefit from an outside view, because the person closest to a business is usually the one least able to see it plainly.

Some clients simply want someone competent to think out loud with — a monthly or quarterly conversation about what's working, what isn't, and what to do about it.

We do that too, on a retainer or per-session basis. Bring the problem you're actually stuck on.