For owners
Do you ever wonder what's actually going on in your business?
Not the bank balance. The business. What it earns, what it's worth, and what would change that.
Sound familiar?
- You look at the P&L and the categories don't match how you think about the business. "Office expense" is $40k and you have no idea what's in it.
- You can't tell whether the business made money last month until the bookkeeper closes it, which is sometime next month.
- You know roughly what the business is worth because someone told you a multiple once. You don't know what a buyer or a bank would actually pay, or why.
- You're about to borrow, hire, bring on a partner, or start thinking about selling, and you'd rather not walk in with numbers you can't defend.
- Every report you get, you rebuild in a spreadsheet before you trust it.
If two of those are you, keep reading.
Stage 1
The Diagnostic
Thirty days. Fixed fee. You get five things.
Your numbers, cleaned up.
Two years of your P&L, reorganized the way a bank or a buyer would read it. Owner perks, family on payroll, and one-time items pulled out so you can see what the business actually earns. Every adjustment written down.
A chart of accounts that fits your business.
Right now your categories tell your accountant what's deductible. They should tell you what you spend to make a dollar. I redo them so that payroll is payroll, marketing is marketing, and "miscellaneous" goes away. Then I give your bookkeeper a map from the old setup to the new one so they can run it without you in the room.
The KPIs worth watching.
Every owner has heard they should track KPIs. Most end up with thirty, tracking none. The problem isn't finding numbers; your software throws off hundreds. The problem is that when everything is a KPI, nothing is, and you go back to running on the bank balance.
I narrow it to the 8 to 12 that actually move this business. For each one: what it means, where it comes from, and how often to look. First we settle which numbers deserve your attention. Building them into a monthly report comes after, so every number on it has earned its place.
The findings.
One page, written the way a buyer or a lender would write it. I spent three years doing exactly this on deals ten times your size: reading a business from the outside and deciding what it's worth and why.
Looking at your business that way changes what you see. A buyer doesn't pay for revenue. They pay for the things that make revenue reliable: customers who come back, margins that hold, a team that runs without you, books they can trust. Those are capabilities, and each one either adds to your number or takes from it. This page tells you which capabilities you already have, which ones you're missing, and what building them would be worth. Whether you ever sell or not, those are the same things that make the business easier to run and easier to borrow against.
What to fix, in order.
A short list of changes, ranked by what they're worth against how hard they are. For each one: who does it, what it costs, and what done looks like.
How it runs
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Kickoff call
What you want from the business, and what state the books are in.
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Data request
One list, sent to you or straight to your bookkeeper.
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Systems walkthrough
One session with you or whoever runs your office.
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Draft review
You see everything first and tell me what I got wrong.
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Final walkthrough
The findings, the fix list, and what to do next.
Most of the time in between is waiting on data and the work happening.
What it costs
Fixed fee, agreed upfront. Scoped to the size of the business on a call.
Books need to be reconcilable to start. If they aren't, I'll tell you on the kickoff call and we'll sort that first.
Stage 2
The Forward View
Most owners stop after the Diagnostic. The roadmap is yours and you can run it with whoever you already have. If you want the numbers to keep working after I leave, this is what that looks like.
A forecast you can run decisions against.
Twelve months, built off the real drivers of your business, not last year plus ten percent. Two what-if versions you choose: add a provider, raise prices, open a second location, drop a service line. Then a monthly check of what actually happened against what we expected.
The numbers, live.
The figures we agreed on in the Diagnostic, built into a report you see every month without asking anyone for it.
Building the roadmap.
Whatever from the fix list you'd rather I do than delegate: the systems change, the pricing review, the collections process.
The Forward View is scoped from your roadmap and priced separately. It's usually monthly. It only happens if you want it.
A bit about me
Elena Ivanov. Three years in EY-Parthenon's transaction diligence practice, then finance lead for a healthcare services roll-up, where I built the KPI reporting the platform runs on. Based in Miami. Fluent in Russian, conversational in Spanish.
Happy to share more on a call.