CASE STUDY
Business growHOW
Business growth by design… not by chance!
Wouldn’t you agree that any serious project needs a good plan to minimise the chances of failure? So why do so many business owners succumb to apathy and plod along without one?
We’re not talking about a traditional business plan you use for approaching your bank for a loan. No, instead what you need is to see the growth of your business in financial terms, so you can focus on devising strategies to increase your yearly profits and hence it’s value.
Identify your targets and devise the strategies needed to grow….
MovementsUK Ltd is a well-established chauffeur driven transport business based in Shepshed, Leicestershire. With 23 drivers and 15 vehicles, MD Bill Cregeen and his team look after the people transportation of some of the areas best-known companies.
During one of our initial quarterly financialDIRECTOR meetings with Bill, the topic of the eventual retirement raised its head and Bill made the statement that he didn’t know when this would be possible, especially by his preferred exit date.
Therefore after undertaking our initial retireSAFE planning session to ascertain the level of assets Bill already held we then moved on to Bill’s best way to increase his personal wealth i.e. by increasing the value of his business (by developing it).
CLIENT FOCUS
Established in:1985
Business Type:Executive Chauffeur & Taxi Services
MovementsUK was established in 1985 and over the past 30 years, they have grown to be a leading premier travel provider in the Midlands.
MovementsUK joined Marlow Proactive in 2012 and utilise a range of services offered by Marlow Proactive including compliance and advisory services.
For more information about MovementsUK visit their website www.movementsuk.com
HERE’S HOW WE HELPED BILL TO FOCUS ON GROWING HIS BUSINESS VALUE…
STEP 1
Once again we started by calculating a quick estimate of the current value of the business.
Because we had calculated the target value he needed from his retireSAFE session that made calculating his current shortfall easy, but for anyone who doesn’t know where they need to get to then we’d recommend some time making these value gap calculations.
STEP 2
Using our forecasting tools we built up a picture of the growth Bill felt was possible and by extending the forecast out over the next 10 years we could see the growth in profits and hence business value to the point where a potential sale of the company would meet Bill’s needs.
STEP 2
STEP 3
Now that we knew what the growth curve needed to be we mapped out the strategies that would be required to fuel this growth.
Growth wouldn’t just come from waiting for the phone to ring with an endless supply of sales orders!
Therefore the strategies required covered all the key profit drivers that would need developing i.e. marketing, sales, service, systems, finance. From this list of development strategies, an action plan by year was created with milestones for checking progress against each year.
STEP 4
Now that we had the annual strategy actions planned we moved on to putting these into the annual budget and key performance indicators tracker (our business onTRACK service) to monitor the company’s actual results against the targets to identify variances for corrective action.
All of the above steps were then maintained in our quarterly financialDIRECTOR meetings with Bill.
Finally, at the end of the year, a full appraisal was undertaken and the business growHOW 10-year plan was tweaked for necessary changes
STEP 4
THE OUTCOME...
Bill acquired a full planning and monitoring system to help maximise the company’s financial performance and hence felt more in control of actually achieving his long term goals initially identified in his retireSAFE planning session.
“I can’t believe nearly every business owner wouldn’t want to put such a system in place.”
Bill Cregeen