Outsourcing a financial director (FD) for your business comes with a lot of benefits for businesses that need help with their corporate finance.
An FD is an essential part of the management team of growing companies, offering on-the-spot advice, guidance and financial analysis.
Their aim is to contribute to the development of a business, but are also key if you want to build credibility among investors and banks.
However, not everyone has the funds or space to hire a fulltime in-house FD. Instead, they choose to outsource the duties.
Objectivity
An FD typically works with all departments of the business they work for to help them plan and manage their budgets.
Ultimately, though, they are beholden to the business owner, and like any of your employees, might sometimes forget about the cold hard truths and just work to please you.
While we’re not suggesting all in-house FDs are like that, outsourced ones always have objectivity in mind while they carry out their duties.
They try to look at things from an unbiased perspective, which allows them to give you an independent and objective view of your financial management.
In fact, it’s in our best interest as virtual FDs to be as objective as possible, as our success as a firm depends on the success of your business.
The benefit of experience
Outsourced FDs typically work with multiple clients at any one time across a range of sectors, picking up a range of experience and knowledge as a result.
That makes our advice much more versatile and flexible than that of your average in-house FD.
As well as a range of businesses, we’ve worked with a variety of stakeholders, investors, banks and other professional advisers, all of which has added to our bank of knowledge we use to help businesses.
Cost-effective
When you start out as a business, getting a FD and accounts team into the office can be a big commitment and large expense.
Outsourcing the work of your FD, who is used to working remotely, is a practical and cost-effective way to solve the issue.
Meanwhile, your outsourced FD will be able to carry out all the course services an in-house can to increase your business’s value for much cheaper.
Scalable
There is no reason why you cannot hire a part-time FD, which might make perfect sense for you if you run a smaller business.
But after they successfully contribute to your growth, you will need their strengths more than ever. With that, you have a tough choice, assuming the FD is not willing to increase their hours: do you get someone new in and hope they will be brought up to speed or make do with your original director?
With an outsourced financial, no such dilemma will ever materialise, as an outsourced FD will be there to work as much or as little as you need.
Defining your personal goals
An internal FD is likely to approach their role by looking purely at the performance of your business.
However, as part of our FD service, we make sure we understand your personal goals and factor those into our thinking and advice.
Once we know those, we can ensure you meet your targets by making sure all the numbers, metrics and data are on track.
Talk to us about your business’s needs.