Business advice
We appreciate that running your business means facing new challenges at every stage. At Chariot House we have helped many business succeed in a wide range of business areas. We can use this experience to help you make the most of the opportunities your business encounters.
Qualified advice
There are many business challenges on which we can advise to help you avoid snags and manage change more successfully.
Business plans
Vision is fundamental to a business. But a business plan fails or succeeds on its figures and that’s where we can help. Coherent financials are vital both to manage the business moving forward and, where necessary, to attract funding and help ensure it is on appropriate and attractive terms.
Raising finance and attracting investment
When you need money to find the growth of your business it’s vital to consider the options carefully. Whether approaching banks or venture capitalists, or borrowing from friends and family, it is important to demonstrate the viability of your proposal clearly. Each lending or investment option has different risks, tax implications, and responsibilities. We help you to assess these alongside cost and flexibility when deciding on the best route. For Limited Companies we can help you set up attractive tax efficient schemes such as Enterprise Investment Schemes or Seed Enterprise Investment Schemes.
Dealing with red tape
We can help you take the complication out of compliance. Ensuring you comply with various filing and record-keeping requirements is an essential but often distracting part of running a business. We have a range of fixed-fee services that handle these needs for you, freeing your time so you can focus on growth and business management.
Growing your business
When you are looking to grow your business it is important to ensure that bigger is also better. Growth in business should be a good thing but if it isn’t well managed it can create more problems than opportunities. We can help you plan how best to grow your business. We can work with you to define how you’ll cope with growth and how to measure and respond to fluctuations as your business develops. Our role is to ensure your growth is as sustainable as possible while helping you achieve the best return from your business at each stage.
Retaining staff
Building motivation and loyalty can be essential to driving productivity. We can use our broad knowledge of current trends to help you understand how best to incentivise and retain staff. Various options have different tax implications and we can help structure profit-sharing, benefit and share schemes so that you and your staff get the most from them.
Cash flow management
Businesses will always have ups and downs, we can help keep you on top. It’s a harsh reality that when you are out of cash you’re out of business. Even profitable businesses can fail because of cash flow problems. We can help you avoid these pitfalls. Ensuring you understand how much funding you need as you hit certain benchmarks is the starting point. This shows you ahead of time when you’ll be trading beyond your means so that you know when to seek more funding or adjust your trading patterns to stay safe.
Good credit control is another essential element we can help you get right by ensuring you have good systems in place that provide useful and accurate information on who owes what and how this is affecting your cash position.
Management buy-out
Successful management buy outs require the right backers for the business in question. And getting the best finance deal requires the figures to be properly structured and presented. We give you independent advice free of any conflict of interest and we work in partnership to help you structure a successful deal.
Share buy-back
Buying out minor shareholders can be an important way to gain more control and move business forward with greater focus. Thanks to recent legislative changes buying out minor shareholders is now easier. We can advise on the most efficient approach to take.
Exit strategies
It is wise to think about your exit strategy before you’ve even set up your business, this way it can inform your business plan from the start. But even if your business is well-established, developing a clear exit strategy is often a useful discipline that helps you focus on what you really want from the future. We can advise on structuring a partial or full share sale for maximum tax efficiency.