A Letter from the Founder

I started Your Business Angels in 1995.

For more than 31 years, I have sat across the table from Australian business owners when things were going well — and when things were anything but.

I have worked extensively around insolvency. I have seen businesses enter administration and liquidation. I have worked alongside insolvency practitioners, lawyers, accountants and creditors, and I have seen first-hand what financial distress does not only to a company, but to the people behind it.

Those formal insolvency processes exist for very important reasons. Sometimes they are the appropriate outcome.

But 31 years has also taught me the value of asking a much earlier question:

Financial trouble rarely arrives on Tuesday morning. It builds.

The tax debt gets a little larger. A supplier gets paid a little later. A customer doesn’t pay when expected. Another payment arrangement is negotiated. The business gets busier, but somehow there is less cash. The owner works harder. Decisions become more difficult.

And for quite a while, it can still feel manageable.

Until it isn’t.

Why Safe Harbour Matters to Me

Safe Harbour provides an important legislative framework for eligible directors who are developing and taking a course of action reasonably likely to lead to a better outcome for the company than immediate administration or liquidation.

But legislation cannot make the changes inside the business.

People have to do that.

That is where our work begins.

Over the years, I have become increasingly convinced that the first thing a business owner needs is not another opinion.

They need the truth.

• Are the accounts right?
• Can we trust the Balance Sheet?
• What does the business really owe?
• What is actually collectible from debtors?
• Who has really funded the business?
• What has the director taken from it?
• What is happening with the ATO and superannuation?
• Are the loans correctly recorded?

And most importantly:

Until we know those things, we are guessing.

And I don’t believe you should make important decisions about the future of a business from numbers you cannot trust.

Then We Have to Do Something With the Truth

Finding the problem is not enough.

Once we know where the business stands, we start asking what needs to change.

Sometimes it is pricing. Sometimes it is debtors. Sometimes it is costs, quoting, labour, finance, tax, drawings, customers or the type of work the business is accepting.

Usually, it is more than one thing.

And after 31 years, I have learned not to expect one dramatic decision to repair years of accumulated problems.

Real change is usually much less glamorous.

That is why our process has become so focused on regular measurement and feedback.

We Stay Involved

One of the things I wanted this program to avoid was the beautifully prepared report that sits in a drawer.

A business under financial pressure doesn’t need somebody to tell it what to do and disappear.

It needs information. It needs accountability. It needs somebody prepared to ask next week:

Through Your Business Angels and our accounting firm Fresh Numbers, we have built a team of nearly 50 people and developed the financial systems, reporting processes and technology that allow us to work with businesses this way.

Technology and AI now help us analyse far more information, far more regularly, than would once have been practical.

But technology isn’t the judgement. It helps us see.

I Want More Than Survival

There is one final point that matters to me.

I don’t want the ambition of this work to be simply getting a business through another week.

Where the circumstances allow it, I want the difficult period to become the reason the business changes.

• Better accounts.
• Better cash control.
• Better pricing.
• Better decisions.
• Tax and employee obligations dealt with properly.
• Less dependence on expensive debt.
• A director who understands the Balance Sheet.
• A business that knows where its money goes.
• And financial habits that remain long after the immediate pressure has passed.

Because if we do this properly, the objective isn’t simply to deal with the business that arrived at our door.

Safe Harbour provides the legislative framework.

We bring the financial information, structure, measurement, experience and persistence to help you work through what happens next.

And we’ll start in the same place we have learned to start after more than three decades: