CASE STUDIES

Virtual Reality Gaming
Successful fundraising for a fantastic business idea

This amazing team of technologists and game developers had a fantastic business idea and vision. But they needed to raise funds to finance product development and equipment purchases. We worked to develop a business plan and create a financial model to understand a) the amount of investment required, and b) the timing.

This helped the founding team to gain a much deeper understanding of the steps involved, which we then used to establish an action plan. With the business plan and financial model completed, we successfully approached investors and banks, raising the required funds needed to complete the development of their innovative product.

Construction / Property Restoration
Rapid return to profitability – in under 6 months

This client came to us suffering monthly losses of $20k, fearful that they would lose the company. Yet just a year ago they were a profitable business!

They had minimal financial data … because they had been successful without, up to this point. We immediately implemented a system to track profitability, that revealed:

  • Which projects were profitable or unprofitable
  • Project profitability by project manager
  • Project profitability by client
  • Project profitability by project type (e.g. new build, renovation, restoration)

We soon saw that two of the project managers were driving significant losses. As well, one of their “best” clients was consistently unprofitable, due to aggressive price negotiations.

Our client could now make informed decisions. Replacing the poor project managers and turning down projects with unprofitable pricing allowed a rapid return to profitability.

Within 6 months of bringing in CFO Source, they were generating monthly profits of $25k.

Manufacturing
Better costing leads to 28% increase in profitability

The owner of this manufacturing business because he was surprised that profits were down despite revenue growth of 20% over the past year.

Our first recommendation was to perform a detailed Product Costing analysis. This revealed that

Only 3 of the 5 major product lines were profitable
The product mix had been slowly changing, such that unprofitable products were representing a greater percentage of total sales.

Armed with this information, we made pricing adjustments and negotiated cost reductions with suppliers, resulting in a 28% increase to overall profitability.

Professional Services Firm
Cashflow systems free up $300k of cash

The owner of this $4,000,000-in-revenues professional services firm was in a period of high growth. Yet despite the profitability and high margins, cashflow was a challenge, particularly when trying to expand capacity and grow his client base.

Through an initial financial assessment, we realized that significant amounts of cash were being held up in Accounts Receivable, taking an average of 120+ days to collect on work performed. We:

  • Immediately designed and implemented a cashflow forecasting process
  • Made changes to the credit terms and policies
  • Put in place a system to track and measure the progress and success of these changes.

Within a period of 6 months, we reduced the average collection period from 120 to 90 days and freed up over $300k of cash that could be used to continue growing the business. And better yet, removing the stress and anxiety to the business owner.

Pharmaceuticals production and sales
Pharmaceutical producer with explosive growth needs better reporting to win investors

A licenced producer in the pharmaceutical space had grown over 250% in the past year. They were looking to raise upwards of $20M in capital to finance expansion. As part of that plan, they needed more streamlined internal budgets.

We helped to build a professional investor deck complete with:

  • Forecasts
  • Growth strategies
  • Capital plan
  • Entity valuation.

Detailed, future-looking budgets and forecasts were prepared as both indicators of potential and as a means of managing current spend. The company is now involved in M&A discussions that we continue to support from the financial strategy perspective. 

Pharmaceuticals export
Boosting a profitable company through better reporting and better ERP/financial software

The owner of this highly profitable company is an exporter of trial medications, with sales approaching $10M. The company, however, was weak on the financial reporting (monthly and quarterly) and financial management.

Working closely with the owner, we advised on the specific reporting and skills deficiencies, creating a plan to provide more robust finance support. We also helped critically evaluate software solutions.

Ultimately we helped them choose the most appropriate one – helping to better automate the finance function, as well as better capture critical management information for future-based analyses.