Corporate Advisory Services – Can You Do Without It?

Managing your business is a complex and ever-changing process. Are you looking for advice? BridgePoint Group’s Corporate Advisory Service may have the answers.

At BridgePoint Group, we have helped hundreds of companies with our corporate advisory services. Neil Parker, BridgePoint Group’s Managing Director, explains the process it has adopted and which has served many clients with improvements in culture, clarity and financial freedom for owners.

Everyday thousands of actions are made based on your decisions, decisions made by your management team and decisions made by every level of staff. External help can provide you with a framework that leads to an alignment of the decision-making process. Which, if lead correctly, can make a huge difference to company culture and ultimately productivity. 

Diagnostic Phase

The first order of business is the diagnostic. Similar to when you go to the doctor and they ask ten questions to work out what your ailment is, following which they ‘take a look under the hood’. You report the symptoms, they verify what they see and triangulating those data points, they prescribe a treatment to fix the problem. 

While the diagnostic process that we employ is similar, our questioning is to define pain points in the business. 

• Where are we at now? 
• Where do you want to be? 
• What’s the gap? 
• How do we close that gap? 

Ongoing Consultation

The process is then a sequence of frequent engagements focusing on closing the gaps. 

We know that the gaps are not limited to financial issues. Every part of a business needs to be addressed, if it contributes to closing the gap as defined in the diagnostic phase or indeed, as it reveals itself through the journey. 

Although there will be commonalities between clients, each business will most probably be at different stages of its lifecycle and may experience different symptoms, or similar symptoms derived from different causes. As a result, no two consultations are exactly the same.

Business owners will themselves have different types and levels of competency and different areas of the business that need to be looked at with a deeper dive – be it HR issues, marketing or production or systems to name a few. BridgePoint Group’s advisory services solutions are very much dictated by which areas the business needs to focus on to close the gap. 

We’re here to help 

Our role as the Advisor is not to do things for you (though we can be retained to do things you can’t do) – it is to facilitate your success. Your role is to make good decisions and implement necessary change. 

It would be extremely arrogant (and plainly wrong) of us to presume we know your business and your industry better than you do. In fact, you almost always have the answers. 

So, the Advisor role isn’t to play ‘expert’ on every matter, it is to help you access that knowledge. It is to bring clarity where sometimes there is none. To bring order where there was chaos. To bring focus where it may have been divided.

A common technique is to challenge business owners to identify and think about the issues that are causing the gap between where they are and where they want to be. To unpack those things and identify the things that need to change to get a different result. 

Once you have identified the things that need to be changed, the thinking changes to how. 

How and when will the changes be introduced? 

• What are all the considerations? 
• What are the impacts down the line? 
• How are you going to message that with the people who are going to be impacted? 

Accountability

Change is hard but success is on you. The Advisor merely advises. The business owner must own the result. And that’s about accountability.

Getting people to take time to deliberately lead their business toward a goal is a challenge. There are always other things to do. There are 1440 minutes to use every day and we focus on prioritising the time to work on the things that matter. When time becomes an excuse, it’s often because we are doing things we are comfortable doing, things we enjoy doing, rather than things that we ought to be doing as leaders in our business. 

If you’re not leading your business, it is symptomatic of something. Whether it’s human nature or a lack of discipline or accountability. Many business owners don’t have someone who holds them accountable. If they don’t have anyone that holds them accountable, they don’t do the things that they intuitively know, need to be done. Sometimes it’s due to a lack of support, sometimes it is a lack of skill, and sometimes they don’t have the context nor the forum to think about those things and resolve them.

BridgePoint Group’s advisory services are about complementing business owners. We acknowledge what they do know and help them access their knowledge bank. Critically, it is turning those thoughts into clear actions. Talking about it, prioritising the actions to take is great but clarifying “what do I actually do?” is critical. The key question for any business owner is “what do I do next?”

A logical extension of services

BridgePoint Group’s advisory services tie into our overall ‘why’. Which is to help people grow their business, make more money and enjoy the freedom that having money in your pocket promotes. That’s what we’re all about. Our corporate advisory services create a pretty impressive impact on a person’s business

If you are curious to find out more, please reach out for a consultation. If you’d like to read more on BridgePoint Group’s services then click here. Don’t forget to follow our LinkedIn page which is constantly updated with advice for any business owner.

Regards 

Neil Parker