The bottom line question: can you afford your Business Review ?  The simplistic answer is: can you afford not to ?  However, we are highly aware that small and medium sized businesses have limited resources and have to spend their overhead budgets wisely, so here’s our final advice to anyone considering engaging an adviser like ourselves or incurring other Business Review costs why you should stop worrying whether you can in fact afford your Business Review:

• Growth opportunities usually disappear in time, but risks have a bad habit of hanging around and getting worse if they aren’t managed.  Delaying a Business Review will usually incur both opportunity costs and outright expenses and / or revenue losses that will probably only increase over time – and can even lead to business failures. Just think about the real and opportunity costs of inefficient sales processes, losing key customers, hiring poorly, losing your best people, being in the wrong premises, giving away your intellectual property or being fined for a regulatory breach – all of which might be prevented by a sound Business Review undertaken with expert help.

• A well planned and executed Business Review with the help of expert advisers will almost certainly identify a “quick win” opportunity that will more than help you to afford your Business Review, including any business adviser costs incurred.

• Hiring the right business adviser doesn’t have to be hard if you follow our advice, and no small business can afford the upfront and opportunity costs of hiring the wrong one.

• If you do carry out a Business Review, we highly recommend “paying it forward”.  Share your learnings with your trusted networks and encourage them to do the same.  In our experience no-one can build a great business on their own, and the advice that they give others will tend to come back with interest.  That’s one of the big reasons why we called ourselves the Advisory Collective – and partner with Collective members who complement our skills and share our Purpose and Values.

Our Business Health Check is designed to meet nearly all of the Business Review needs of small and medium businesses of all shapes and types, and can be completed online.  The highly practical expertise that we share through that process, through our Assessment process, Reports and follow up Consultations, can provide any smaller business owner or leader with a wide range of valuable business insights and options to consider for how it might best grow sustainably and maximise its value.

So now you know the “why, when, how and who” of Business Reviews, and how you can afford your Business Review.  We wish you all the best with your own Business Reviews, and look forward to hearing about your success.