Challenge

Simon Kallu rebranded his firm SRK Accounting to reflect their advisory focus. Now trading under the name GrowFactor, the brand is growing and strengthening. Simon wanted to take the next step when it came to advising his clients so has started looking into business coaching for business growth. His team needed to up their skill sets to cope with demand, so he looked to Futrli for a solution.

Solution

The firm has been a Futrli customer for around four years now. They’re experienced in the software, but Futrli Advisory Certification helped get the whole team up to a high standard. The ability to show clients their real-time data has allowed the firm to build a great reputation as advisors, therefore opening up possibilities for exploring coaching and more.

Results

The team is all successfully advising clients from a range of industries. Simon is freed up to explore new avenues for revenue and can spend time nurturing clients that need his help. The rebrand has been successful, and white labeling reflects the new look firm across the Futrli platform, tying all their services together.

Interview in full

You’ve recently rebranded to GrowFactor – can you tell us why?

We were previously SRK Accounting but that name wasn’t really cutting it as we were helping our clients with a lot more than accounting. The firm needed a new brand identity to let everyone know what we’re really about: helping our clients build great businesses so they can have great lives. So we help them plan their business and get their business performing well so they can effectively make money and meet their own personal goals.

We love the name GrowFactor and we love the logo. The eight strands match the eight services we provide. For every client, we find out what their ‘grow factor’ or growth strategy is and match up the services that they need.

Tell us a bit more about these forecasting services

Our core service is always going to be accountancy because we’re chartered accountants but I think that businesses expect a lot more now. When it’s a growing business, they’re going to need access to cash, so we help with cash flow forecasting and funding. We rely on Futrli alone for that.

Our core services are around cash, profit, growth, and one area we’re really going to start pushing over the next year because we’re good at is strategic coaching. We’re launching a boardroom program too, a six to an eight-week course in a growth strategy to teach business owners to really understand and get the best out of their numbers – not be afraid of them. We aim to empower our clients.

How are you using Futrli in accounting?

For forecasting and reporting, there’s nothing that can touch Futrli right now. The PDF reports look so good, and we’ve got a live engine feeding real-time data through from Xero. It allows us to be proactive for our clients.

We use the alerts to make sure we’re on top of what’s going on in a client’s business instead of having to log in every two minutes and look at what’s going, the system will alert us if there’s an issue whether it’s good or bad. We use Futrli to create management accounts packs and run board meetings, we use it to prepare investor decks, presentations for investors on the numbers. We use it for everything and it’s the only software we use.

How do you conduct client meetings?

Firstly, we sit down with and focus on the client. We give them a brief overview of what we do then get them to fill in a questionnaire which generates a report about the strengths and weaknesses of their business and from that report we can identify what the top three issues are.

Asking:

• What are the top three things that keep you up at night?
• Where do you feel like your business is strong and weak?
• Have you got a cash flow forecast?

This gears us towards the two to three services we should be talking to them about.

With an existing client, whenever we’re having a quarterly review meeting we’ll ask the same questions and check in on them. It depends on the size and scope of their engagement as to how often we talk or meet after that. For a CFO client, we’ll be talking to them every week, for a tiny startup the maximum we’d go between meetings is 90 days.

Has this changed the way you’ve approached pricing?

We create a bespoke package for every client which is billed monthly. It mostly depends on personal circumstances. We’ll put it on a monthly retainer then review it on an annual basis. There’s no right way of pricing advisory. Sometimes people might pay us £20k upfront for project work, but we have an option to spread it out over 12 months for example.

Tell us why you decided to white label Futrli

It was brand coherent to white label. It made more sense for a client to log in and see our brand identity and colors, theme, etc. It was purely based on that. We don’t necessarily have to mention Futrli upfront to a client, it’s our forecasting and reporting tool.

We didn’t want to be reselling licenses, we wanted to use it as a tool. All our clients get it, from startup to CFO. It’s been super positive in terms of the reports we provide and the value they have and the ability for us to use it as a structure for meetings with clients.

What did you think of Futrli Advisory Certification?

The whole firm has completed certification. I was searching for years for a way to upskill my team as advisors, not just accountants. Previously, I had to run all of the management accounts meetings. But now our client managers run the meetings and I’m happy that they have the skills and tools to do that and add value to the client. It’s all about scalability.

Sum up your opinion of Futrli

It’s a really awesome facilitator of being a proactive advisor. I don’t think that we could do that proactive advice from the numbers alone because it gives us alerts and I don’t think there’s anything else there at the moment that can give us that live data view. In terms of reporting with clients, it’s embedded for every client for us, it’s on our critical tools list.