CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – Kirk W. McLaren, founder and CEO of Foresight CFO Consulting, Inc. spoke to Chicago Business Columnist Mark Imperial to discuss how privately held companies ranging from as small as 1 Million in revenue to 55 Million in revenue can gain the competitive growth power of much larger companies by outsourcing their CFO and accounting operations to Foresight CFO. In this interview, McLaren spoke candidly about how the companies they have helped benefit every day from the Value-Builder Score and the Strategic Financial Evaluation tools they access through Foresight CFO.
After years of work growing an education company from 35 Million to 127 Million in revenues, then having successfully sold it with the management team, McLaren built a strong track record and reputation that got the attention of several other companies that called him for help. While ordinary accounting services use an Excel model, Foresight CFO offers a much deeper, insightful evaluation they call a “Synergy Analysis”, using their proprietary, breakthrough tool they developed, called the “Strategic Financial Evaluation”. McLaren was asked to share his methods with Imperial’s business owner subscribers.
“To be able to equip small businesses with the vital insights they need to measurably grow their valuation and revenues is exciting.” said McLaren. “Applying our proprietary methods, a recent education company client added 2.7 million dollars to their company value, and getting those types of measurable results for our clients is surreal.”
When asked for details of that case study, McLaren added, “We provided the education company with a report we call a “Synergy Analysis”, which is a multi-year forecast, analyzing prior year actuals and current year budget forecast. The analysis runs a variety of growth scenarios. In their case, their profitability was much lower than industry average, which is something we wouldn’t tolerate for our clients. One of the things we help our clients achieve is to place them in the top percentile of their industry. For them, we identified a way to achieve that by only needing a tiny 1% boost in a few areas that would increase the value of the company significantly.”
McLaren gave further details, “These were small, but hidden areas of opportunity that they couldn’t see before that included just a 1% boost in price, a 1% reduction of direct cost and a 1% decrease in overhead. In their case, this amounted to an effective 37% increase in overall profitability. We could see this all the way through the value of the company. By making these very reasonable, modest managerial changes, our client was able to quickly increase the value of the company by 2.7 million dollars.”
When asked what makes Foresight CFO unique and their services effective, McLaren explained, “We combine developing 8 specific business drivers with Strategic Financial Management in our month-to-month comprehensive service that delivers our clients huge, measurable returns.” McLaren continued, “We have invested heavily in infrastructure and technology platforms. We don’t have an Excel model, we have a complete Strategic Financial Evaluation database. With this platform, we are able to pull in peer industry benchmark data so we can see opportunities clearly. Our key advantage is our experienced CFO’s, reliable accounting, and Strategic Financial Management System™ tools– what typically would take a full-time, in-house CFO, weeks to accomplish, we can do in half a day.”
When asked to detail the proprietary platform they developed and use, McLaren added, “With the Strategic Financial Evaluation tool, we can do a multi-year forecast, a peer comparison, and the evaluation forces us to think critically to find breakthroughs. This, combined with our hands-on work with the management teams on the 8 specific business drivers achieves the predictable result. These specific business drivers include Scale; Growth Potential; Employee Dependencies; Customer Concentration; Supplier Dependencies; Customer Net Promoter Score, and Uniqueness, which is a strong driver of revenue, to name a few.
McLaren’s company, Foresight CFO Consulting, Inc. has been providing outsourced CFO and Accounting services for privately-held companies nationwide, and their clients are thrilled with their results.
“I wasn’t getting what I needed from accounting. Now I know my cash at the beginning of the week and get a management report at the end of the week listing what was done and what will be done next week. Not only do I get monthly financial statements on-time, they provide me a dashboard style analysis. Life saver.”
– D. Mattison, Technology Group Inc., Washington, DC
“The monthly value building program changed how I work. By the second quarter opportunities replaced fires as I invested in the scaleable part of my business. I learned to use my financials and the peer benchmarks to make competitive decisions that I didn’t even know about before. Just by achieving average inventory turn I freed up $627 thousand in cash”
– Anne Niemira, Identity Food LLC, Sacramento, California
“Foresight CFO corrected a year of messy accounting records in three weeks then kept getting better. For the first time the bank extended me a line of credit based on the reliability of my numbers.”
– Tom Greenberg, Triple Education, Austin, Texas
“Our CFO provided market insights into our strategic planning process. We compared ourselves to the industry then used a long term forecast to figure out where we needed to be and where we needed to start this year to maximize our valuation. Working together monthly helped us understand cost and pricing options as we improved sales and built the capacity that supports our growing business. Profit increased 38% already and the operational audit produced $1.23 million in cost savings”.
– Bennett Dolan, Sport Healthcare Companies, Chicago
“Thank you for taking over my back office operations. I am about to devote myself to client services that is making the difference”
– William Wolfe, Wolfe Legal, New York
Businesses can get their complimentary Value Builder Score at their website by visiting: www.ForesightCFO.com or by calling 844-388-6635.