As an entrepreneur, keeping your finger on the pulse of your business entails multi-tasking, troubleshooting, quite often ‘fire fighting’ and normally not enough time in the day to get everything done!

Not seeing the wood for the trees is a common issue in business but utilising an experienced, external consultant such as myself, not stuck in the day-to-day grind, can bring considerable benefits – helping to establish the correct strategies to achieve business success. My work relies on practical first-hand experience and I favour plain English solutions, keeping technicalities and jargon to a minimum so messages are clear and not open to misinterpretation. Areas where I can particularly contribute include:

• Business performance improvement. Working through ‘health checks’ to determine clear points that could benefit from strengthening or identifying specific points on which to focus.

• Diagnostics. Determining what the problems are, presenting these findings and working with management to provide ways to resolve the issues in a sustainable way.

• Mentoring, coaching, support and guidance. Helping to improve performance of key management.

• Management issues. Assisting company management to cope with change in a sustainable way, be it rapid expansion, new trading divisions, dramatic loss in revenue, downsizing, finding new key leaders/managers, acquisition or merger integration, new premises or geographical expansion.

• Exit strategies. Formulating from scratch or advising on owners proposals by making relevant recommendations applicable to the particular situation. This could include sale of the business, management buyouts, flotations, new management teams, etc. This is an area where I have considerable first-hand knowledge.

• Acquisitions. I can help determine whether acquisitions would be an appropriate part of your business strategy, reviewing the merits of specific target businesses, researching and short listing suitable candidates for acquisition, directly approaching third parties and assisting in the integration. This is another area where I have strong experience.