As a business owner, taxes and minimizing their liability is top of mind when thinking of accounting. A controller or CFO will make sure that your tax concerns will align with your business needs: writing everything off is a strategy that, in most cases, will jeopardize your ability to get funding to fuel your growth. An outsourced controller or CFO will keep an eye on all of your business goals. They also will monitor your performance compared to your industry standards and eliminate money-wasting activities or behaviors.

Scaling a business is about leverage: you have a product or services that customers want to pay for. That is your leverage. Some goes for money. Finance a new project or secure funding to scale is all about leverage: leveraging your customers’ demand to realize more profit and repay your investment or the bank’s. Professional financial projections are an underwriting requirement for securing funding. They are your validation for your ambitions.

Rising as a CEO requires foremost to understand your own abilities and surround yourself with complementary collaborators who will augment your capacities. Tools, like accounting software, are not enough to ensure you are best set up for success. Numbers matter. Altima’s bookkeepers will ensure that your company’s vital signs, the ones you check when hiring, buying inventory or launching a new project are accurate and that your financials satisfy any banks or lenders’ quality standards.

We’ve all heard different opinions about business plans: All businesses need one! Business plans are a thing of the past! Simply put, no one needs a copy and paste from Google on market size and marketing practices, but everyone needs to map out how to go from point A to point B to organize ideas, create clarity and focus. You want to blueprint what opportunities you will focus on and what resources you will need. That’s a strategic plan. An outside collaborator will guide your efforts, and most importantly discover and fill any gaps.
If you are just starting a business, then you want to outline the problem you are solving, which customers want to pay for your solutions and how you will get your money from their pocket to yours. That’s a business plan.

Leading roles are often lonely. Not every CEO has a board to keep them on track. With hours on hours, days on days having to make hundreds of decisions, it can be difficult to lose focus and keep up with timelines and deliverables. Responding to constant demands of a growing business, it is not easy to keep the staff motivated. Objective and Key Results (OKR) is a method to rally the troops, bring clarity and create accountability. Leadership sets the direction. Altima’s experts guide your employees to contribute their expertise to achieve your objectives, and commit to key results, setting their own accountability.

We all have a favorite restaurant where we can’t help but eat our favorite dish every time. Am I right? You know exactly how it is going to look, how it is going to taste, and how long it will take. And you expect it to be the same every time. The chef has a recipe where ingredients are noted, their specific measurements and every single step to prepare it. The kitchen staff can take on the steps assigned to them. The sous-chef can make sure that everyone is on track. The  chef is confident the meal will relish the patrons, and the owner of the restaurant knows exactly how much profit will be made.

The customers know what to look forward to every single time. The team is empowered to make it happen. The suppliers know what to expect. And the owner knows that every second worked and every dollar spent daily count. Is it the kind of processes that you have?