What is Financial Solutions?
We get a lot of questions regarding what we mean by “Financial Solutions.” The simple answer is that we help our clients find solutions to their financial problems. We do not offer life insurance, retirement planning, or any other investment tools. (We do however work with some outstanding financial planners who do offer these services and would be happy to refer you to them.) Instead, by analyzing your business model, reviewing how and what you bill your customers, and tracking your expenses we can help to maximize your profits. Here are two examples.
Lost and found
A client was busy servicing her customers but didn’t have any money in the bank. We reviewed her bank statements (something that she, like many people, didn’t do) and produced a monthly expense analysis. We were able to identify that she was spending $500 a month for a storage facility that she had forgotten about and didn’t even need. This saved her $6000 a year! We also found that she had $2500 in a forgotten bank account.
Increasing revenues
At a new business meeting, a prospective client insisted that she was billing 30 hours of her time weekly. We told her that was impossible. She politely disagreed but we stood our ground. It was clear that her actual earnings were only about half of what they would have been if she was billing 30 hours a week of her time, without even including billable hours from her staff.
We were hired in the summer of 2010 and as suspected our analysis showed that she was only billing about 35% of her time and almost none of her associates' time. For various projects she had provided clients with estimates and then billed accordingly without actually tracking billable hours. This not only minimized her earnings on current projects, but also minimized future earnings since she wasn’t learning from previous projects and quoting the right fees going forward.
It wasn’t feasible to start billing current clients 65% more in fees. But, by billing only one additional hour of time per project she increased her annual revenue by 10%!
This past January she was frustrated by the older projects which still weren’t earning nearly what they would have if she had properly estimated her time. She was considering increasing her hourly rate but was concerned about client perception. By once again simply increasing billable hours on each project by one hour, she increased her annual revenue by another 10%.