A Product of Your Business Angels

The Your Business Angels Safe Harbour program is a product of more than three decades of practical experience.

It brings together what we have learned about accounting, cash, business behaviour, financial distress, insolvency, restructuring and — perhaps most importantly — what actually happens inside a business when things need to change.

Built on Experience

Your Business Angels began working with Australian business owners in 1995.

Through Your Business Angels and our accounting firm, Fresh Numbers, we now have a team of nearly 50 people working across accounting, financial management and business support.

That combination has taught us to look beyond what a set of accounts reports.

We want to understand how the business actually works.

• Where does the cash come from?
• Where does it go?
• Which work makes money?
• Why isn’t profit becoming cash?
• What is happening to debtors and creditors?
• What is being funded by the ATO?
• What is being funded by the directors?
• What does the business need to produce to meet all of its obligations?
• And what behaviours inside the business are creating or repeating the problems?

Those questions have shaped the program we use today.

Built From Both Sides of the Problem

For decades, we have also worked in and around financial distress and insolvency.

• We have seen liquidations.
• We have seen administrations.
• We have worked alongside insolvency practitioners, lawyers and creditors.

We understand that formal insolvency processes exist for important reasons and, in some circumstances, may be the appropriate course.

But that experience has also shown us the value of confronting financial difficulty while there is still an operating business to examine and options to consider.

That is where Safe Harbour can become relevant.

What We Have Built

The program starts with reliable information.

1. 1

   We establish the truth.

   We work to get the accounting records current, reconciled and meaningful. We examine the Balance Sheet, cash, debtors, creditors, loans, taxation obligations, employee entitlements, director accounts and the underlying profitability of the business.

2. 2

   We act.

   From that truth, we identify what needs to change and help build the course of action.

3. 3

   We measure.

   We regularly review the financial information, compare what happened with what was expected, challenge the results and make corrections where necessary.

4. 4

   We document the journey.

   Throughout that process, we create a contemporaneous record of the information considered, decisions made, actions taken and results achieved.

That has become our operating cycle:

More Than Financial Repair

There is another lesson we have learned over 31 years.

The numbers often lead us somewhere else.

They can expose problems with pricing, quoting, productivity, customers, staffing, purchasing, finance, management habits or the way decisions are made.

When they do, we have those conversations.

We are not trying to turn Safe Harbour into a general business consulting exercise. We are responding to what the financial information tells us needs attention.

Because ultimately, a stronger Balance Sheet is produced by better decisions and better behaviour inside the business.

The Shift

The shift is away from waiting for financial pressure to become a crisis.

It is toward establishing the truth earlier, confronting problems directly and measuring whether the changes being made are actually working.

But where there is a genuine opportunity to pursue a better outcome, we believe that opportunity deserves current information, disciplined action, regular measurement and serious attention.

That is what we have built.

• Not a document.
• Not a one-off meeting.
• Not a theoretical restructuring exercise.