I spent more than 25 years working in accounting, and for a long time I believed that if you understood the numbers, you could understand the business.
And to a large extent, you can.
The numbers can tell you an enormous amount. They can show you that wages are getting too high, margins are disappearing, cash is getting tight or the business is becoming less productive. They can highlight where performance has changed and give you an early warning that something isn’t quite right.
But somewhere along the way, I had an uncomfortable realisation.
Seeing the problem wasn’t always the same as being able to help the business owner solve it.
That realisation has shaped a lot of what I’ve done since. In this short video, I share a little more of the story behind why I do the work I do today.
Looking Beyond the Numbers in a Business
There were times in my accounting career when I had a business owner sitting in front of me who was clearly struggling. I could explain what their numbers were telling us, but I didn’t always have the tools to help them with the people, structure, leadership or decisions sitting underneath those numbers.
And I hated that feeling.
Because telling a business owner their wages are too high doesn’t help much if the real problem is that work is constantly being redone, nobody is managing workflow properly, responsibilities aren’t clear or the owner keeps stepping in to rescue everyone.
Knowing profit has fallen doesn’t necessarily tell you that the owner has become the bottleneck, that an important role has outgrown the person doing it, that pricing hasn’t kept pace with the way the service is now being delivered, or that the team has become so dependent on the owner that everything slows down when they’re not there.
The numbers are incredibly useful, but often they’re showing us the consequence of something happening somewhere else in the business.
That realisation changed the direction of my work.
I started learning more about the parts of business that I’d previously been able to see but didn’t always know how to influence. Leadership, teams, behaviour, structure, accountability, decision-making and what actually helps people make change happen.
Importantly, I didn’t leave the numbers behind.
They’re still one of the first places I look because they give us something objective to work with. But now I’m equally interested in what’s happening around them.
What’s changed? Where is the owner getting stuck? What’s happening within the team? What isn’t clear anymore? Which decisions keep finding their way back to the owner? What has the business simply outgrown?
When an Established Business Outgrows Its Systems
That last question is particularly important for established businesses.
A business can operate successfully for years and then reach a point where something changes. The team gets bigger, the owner wants to step back, a key employee leaves, profit starts tightening despite revenue looking healthy, or the business simply becomes too complicated to keep managing through conversations and everything the owner carries around in their head.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that the business is failing. It’s that the business has outgrown the way it used to work.
How Structure Supports Business Growth
That’s where structure becomes so important.
Clear roles, better workflow, accountability, financial targets, leadership expectations, systems and better ways of making decisions give the business a stronger foundation for the stage it has reached.
It doesn’t mean turning a great service business into a bureaucratic nightmare where everyone needs a form to make a cup of tea. It means putting enough structure around the business to support what it has become and where the owner wants to take it.
Why I Became a Business Improvement Coach
And that’s really why I became a Business Improvement Coach.
Accounting taught me to understand what was happening in a business. Everything I’ve learned since has helped me work with business owners on what to do about it, bringing together the numbers, people, leadership and structure rather than looking at any one of them in isolation.
Helping Financial Professionals Support Their Clients
It’s also why I now teach other financial professionals how to have these broader business improvement conversations with their clients.
I spent too many years frustrated by having a business owner sitting in front of me who needed more help than I knew how to give them. I never wanted to feel that way again, so I went looking for the knowledge and tools I was missing.
Eventually I realised I could do more than use them myself.
By sharing what I’ve learned with other financial professionals, collectively we can help far more business owners than I could ever hope to reach on my own.
And that matters to me, because behind every set of numbers is a business owner carrying the responsibility, risk and uncertainty that comes with building a business.
Is Your Business Ready for Its Next Stage?
If your business has changed but the way you’re running it hasn’t quite caught up, that’s often where the next piece of work begins.