Our Services

EFM Growth Partners work with you to support, encourage and challenge you and your management team.  Our goal is to ensure the best outcomes for you as a business owner, your staff and your customers.

At all stages of your business, from post-revenue start-ups, through established businesses to planning an exit strategy, we will help you maximize the value of your business.

Managing in a Crisis

Every business needs CPR – some in the medical sense, in times of crisis don’t leave it too late, but in every day trading, all should have a focus on Cash, Profit and Risk.

In times of crisis it starts with “have I got enough CASH headroom to deal with, react and cope with the ‘shock’ of the crisis on the business?”

Almost inevitably it leads to some form of lost PROFIT – sales start to dry up, customers delay payments, supply chains slow down, and costs are not scaled back quick enough.

The businesses that survive are often those with foresight or access to the experience of having been through a similar crisis who quickly identify the RISKS and plan accordingly to the new ‘norm’.

This may include areas not considered previously or taking steps that you had been mulling over or been uncertain as to whether to action or not – your hand is now forced:

  • Should I pivot my business model from offline to online or from face to face to remote?
  • Can I make a stepped change in my significant costs by working with less staff, using part-time but focused resource and more remote working, also resulting in reduced property costs?
  • Do I have the right products and services – has a new market opened up?

Whatever you are thinking, having access to an experienced person on tap, as required, from outside the business can be invaluable to bring experience and knowledge to help evaluate and challenge your decisions.

"Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them." Andrew Grove - Former CEO of Intel Corporation

Scale Up Your Business

Starting up and running a business can often be a daunting prospect for some entrepreneurs starting out their journey as a business founder. But after settling into their new role and the initial hurdles have turned into the everyday norm, the entrepreneur will begin to think about the next big step in scaling up their company.

A number of challenges can come with scaling up a business, often differentiating between the processes that are capable of scaling with it, from those that aren’t. As such, success doesn’t always come easily.

Is your business ready to scale up? Find out by taking our Scale Up Healthcheck.

Upon completion, you’ll receive a scale up score, summary feedback and the opportunity to have a free one hour consultation with one of our experienced EFM Growth Partners.

Our experienced Growth Partner team are here to support your scale up vision. Our expertise can help guide you through the scale up journey, producing a bespoke & strategic growth plan in-line with your vision, ensuring you avoid the pitfalls of business growth.

Scale up your business with EFM Growth

“Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.” Biz Stone - Co-Founder of Twitter

Coaching and advice

Business growth needs a vision and a strategy.  You have to form a clear picture of where you want to be and how you are going to get there. Achieving this vision and strategy could involve anything from developing a more effective sales and marketing strategy to improving your performance.

Our business growth advice will help you take a step back, to see the bigger picture and develop a focused business growth strategy to drive the performance of your business.

If you want to get a clearer understanding of where you want your company to go and the right strategy to undertake, check out the Client Needs Analysis tool.

Our Growth Partners will help you create a clear vision of where you want your business to be.  We will jointly develop and agree a plan which focuses on the vital things you need to do to achieve your goals. Together with this we will agree KPIs and metrics to measure the growth journey of your business. The plan will also support you in identifying and addressing the key barriers to business growth.

Our business growth coaching services are tailored to your specific requirements. You choose the number of sessions you need, how long we spend together and how frequently. We can work on the basis of one session or a series of meetings and reviews, whichever you prefer.

“Having a more experienced and successful counselor guiding someone in a chosen profession is a wise decision and good career move.” ― Jose A. Aviles,

Driving Business Performance

For a business to be successful, every owner needs to ensure that their business is operating as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Improving the performance of the business requires an understanding of the key drivers of the business and a practical approach to  optimising these key drivers.

Important areas to consider include planning – both strategic and financial – productivity and all its underlying factors, profitability from the perspective of costs, sales, pricing and margins, and risk reduction.

Our Growth Partners offer successful experience in improving business performance, together with highly effective tools and processes to help you manage, monitor and improve the performance of your business.

Find out more about Your Business Success HERE

This powerful “Your Business Success” Programme provides you with a “step by step” process to build your business to a new level of success. Includes a “How to” workbook outlining the simple steps, access to EFM Growth advisors, advice from top entrepreneurs, resources, diagnostics, software and more.

Exit Planning

Building a successful business from start-up to sustained profitability is no easy feat, especially in the current economic climate. There are no short-cuts or absolute guarantees when building a thriving business. But there are successes, which come from a combination of careful planning, hard work and working with the right staff. After investing significant amounts of money, resources and time into the business, it is unwise to jettison the rewards of your hard work by failing to plan and execute a successful exit strategy.

Are you prepared to exit your business? Take our 3 minute Exit Planning Healthcheck to find out.

Our Growth Partners can help you devise the right strategy for your business. Planning early will enable you to maximise your business’ value and attractiveness to a potential investor or buyer, avoid sudden shock exits and detrimental effects on your brand, customers, shareholders and staff. You only get one chance to exit successfully.

Contact EFM Growth to support your business exit

“Every company needs an exit strategy and an exit plan. Ideally, the exit strategy should be agreed upon by the founders before the first pound of investment goes into the company.” Basil Peters - Exit Planning Strategist

Analysis and Opportunity

Are you considering a business opportunity? Looking for new ways to develop existing business, or add new products or services?

Whether you plan to expand an existing business or acquire an existing business, a proper analysis will help you evaluate your business ideas.

It is essential to understand whether an opportunity fits with your core competences, has a viable market and can be introduced at the right time and price.  It’s also critical to ensure that you have, or can build, the operational capacity to deliver your new product, and that is is financially viable.

This all sounds like reasonably good sense, but it can be a complex and time-consuming process, especially if you haven’t taken this approach before.

Contact EFM Growth for expert help in evaluating an opportunity

Remember: Opportunities are positive and external: they benefit those who can take advantage of them, but they cannot be ‘produced’ as and when desired.

We Support, Encourage and Challenge

We believe that business advice is not just about providing information. A good business adviser is a person who is on tap all the time and can add great insight and ideas in not just the good times but also the bad times.

By building a relationship of trust we can develop a deeper, shared understanding of your business problems and opportunities.

This makes them the go to person for ideas when things are tough and where that conversation with internal people is too sensitive or just needs an external perspective. We work with our clients to diagnose and solve problems, recommending practical, experienced based solutions and programmes for change and support our clients in delivering change.

We give business owners the confidence to make the tough choices and help our clients to encourage consensus and commitment to their business to make change.

In order to achieve your vision, you must measure and manage your effectiveness – effective operations are the key to the future viability of any business. We help our clients challenge their operational effectiveness and remove their barriers to improved performance whilst also developing relevant metrics and forecasting tools to ensure plans are on track.

"It's a very personal service; EFM gets to know the business so therefore all their advice is in the context of where we are as an organisation and where we're going. The business has benefited significantly, from the advisory perspective. I think I get more objective advice from EFM than anything I have tried before. " MD, Marketing Agency

Focus - Customer, Product, People

• Can our company grow faster selling to current customers or by finding new ones? And does this view change with selling into UK customers or overseas customers?
• Which of our products contributes most to our business? Which has the most potential? Which has the biggest impact if sales dried up?
• How do we plan our investments in technology, products and people?

Understanding your best options for growth can be complicated. Rarely do plans have an immediate impact, – change takes time and risks need to be considered – one thing for certain however is that a growing business will usually need to spend cash before it gets any benefit. Also it’s not always a case of doing more of what got you here, but working out what to do differently and having the plan and forecast to get you there.

Options for growth may be in areas you haven’t considered before:

  • You may need new resources and capabilities to meet your growth ambitions. Part time, full time, contractors and interims are all options to be evaluated.
  • Growth through increased market share requires a plan and cash to take share from competitors.
  • International expansion creates new rules and challenges and often costs a lot more than you expect – doing business overseas will rarely be the same as doing business in the UK.
  • Expansion through Acquisition, joint venture or partnership can be extremely beneficial but will not bring the benefits unless the risks are carefully thought through.

Whatever you’re thinking, our team draws on years of practical experience to help you evaluate your options and make sound decisions for growth. And remember, it helps if you’re prepared to think outside the box!

"Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth." John F Kennedy

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