You may not know the full range of services we provide. We don’t just do your accounts and tax returns. We are your trusted advisor and we have a lot of knowledge of your affairs.
It’s also good that we know what your concerns and issues are, and it’s helpful if you discuss any major changes with us as there may be business or tax aspects you need to know about first. Remember all advice is time limited – what may have been true last year may not still hold now, so do check in first.
You expect us to be proactive. For us, that means identifying potential concerns, making sure you know how we can help you, and generally providing solutions.
To that end, below is a series of help sheets. Each help sheet identifies a possible concern, provides some education and some possible solutions. Some of these are particularly appropriate as we move into a difficult economic period. So, instead of taking the usual marketing approach, teasing you with our offer and then sending you the help sheet, we are making all of them available now.
Jump to the ones that interest you most. The rest can wait.
List of help sheets
- Maximising profit
- Increasing sales
- Personal tax strategies
- Business tax strategies
- Retirement planning
- Exit planning
- Valuations
- Wealth planning
- Strategic planning
- Business plans and forecasts
- Virtual Finance Director
- Cash management
- Create helpsheets for your business
Maximising Profit
Profits are hard enough to come by, and it looks as though it’s about to get harder. Profits are what fuels any growth, pays you, the owners, provides for your team and ultimately determines what your business is worth and whether it’s successful. Obviously, you need to maximise profits.
Gross profit
The best way to control your profits and keep them moving upwards is to control your gross profit. This is about expanding sales whilst at the same time controlling the direct costs of sales.
To do that you have to understand your market and how it is changing, and at the same time how your competitors are responding to the market. We don’t like to see you focus on what your competitors are doing, but you still need to be aware. We do like to see you focus on what your customers are doing.
That means high service levels, on time and on budget, and checking that your customers are getting what they want from you when they want it.
You need to be cute about getting recommendations and other cost-effective ways of expanding your customer base.
You need to keep your costs minimised and that doesn’t just mean prices but efficiencies. Make sure that your business is running as effectively as possible so there is no wastage of time, materials, or other resources.
Think about dual sourcing your major supplies so that if one supplier puts the prices up or runs out of stock, you have an alternative.
Don’t do the knee jerk reaction of reducing prices. It usually ends up as a race to the bottom, and businesses fail that way very quickly.
Minimise your overheads where you can but spend most of your time and attention on the gross profit area. Most of your overheads can only be cut once so don’t spend too much time on internal matters. Think always about the external customer focus.
Think about how your business is financed and whether changing financing arrangements would benefit you either in profitability or cash flow. Particularly think about how you finance your assets and how the working capital cycle can be sped up, so you get more out of the same.
This means looking at your credit control, your stockholding, and how you pay suppliers.
We would also consider ways of minimising your tax burden such as the way in which you pay yourself, timing receipts and payments and pension strategies, amongst other things.
Let’s round up
You need to be on top of your profitability which means your income and costs. Unsurprisingly proper books and records are essential to monitor this. It’s not necessary to produce a full set of accounts every month but it would be helpful to select the key elements that best lets you understand what’s going on. At least, that will be sales volume, monthly and possibly weekly, gross profit and percentage, and comparisons with previous months and any targets.
We can help with what’s important and what’s not. We want you to survive and thrive.
Increasing sales
Every business needs sales to survive, and to thrive in an increasingly competitive world, these sales need to increase. But getting new sales is hard. Here are some thoughts on the basic ways you can attract and keep the customers you want.
Existing customers
Rank your customers in terms of ease of doing business, amount they are spending with you, how promptly they pay, and how likely they are to go out of business.
Some of your customers will be poor quality, and you need to think about whether you want them at all. We know that means a drop in sales, but usually that means an increase from your other customers where you’ve got more time to spend with them and find out what they need. Also, poor quality customers tend to lose you money either by going bankrupt, not paying you on time so you can’t reinvest in your business, or wanting discounts.
Don’t chase every sale as though every sale has the same value, because it hasn’t.
Market
Know your market, and how it is changing. Be aware of competitors, but do not fit your business to what they are doing. They do not have your best interests at heart, and they do not pay you. Concentrate on your customers.
Segment your market. The way you ranked your customers will serve as a good guide. Segments can be geographic, size, type, what they buy, and what price they buy it at, amongst others.
Match price and gross profit for your various products against these segments so you can see which is most profitable and where you might want to put more marketing efforts. Some products you may want to sell as add-ons to existing sales because the profit is lower, and you don’t want to spend too much on marketing them.
Marketing methods
Review your marketing methods. Is it the traditional salesperson, via social media, advertisements, word of mouth? Again, look at your existing customer base and see where you got the leads. It’s easy to see which were the most successful routes to market and which produced you the best results in terms of gross profit. They may not be the same. This level of detail informs you better where to put more marketing effort.
Measure
Once you’ve decided what you want to do, measure the results. Make sure you’re getting what you’re expecting to get and tweak it regularly if you aren’t.
Service
Being in business is hard, and it’s about to get harder.
Make sure you find out what your customers real needs are and give them exemplary service so that those needs are met. Talk to your customers regularly about this. Ask them why they buy from you and no one else, and make sure you fulfil that, and ask them what else you can do for them. And if they’re happy with you, ask them if they know of anybody else that you can help.
Let’s round up
Sales are difficult, and nearly all of us are nervous of approaching customers and asking for more. But these are people who you know and deal with regularly. What’s best for them can be best for you too. So don’t be afraid of segmenting your customer base, finding out what they’re buying from you and what it’s achieving for you, and asking for more.
We can help you with the data analysis and the interpretation. It’s generally very insightful and can lead to better and easier conversations with your customers. Just like you value your customers, we value you. We want to see you survive and indeed thrive.
Personal tax strategies
You are always interested in trying to minimise the amount of tax you pay. So are we, and we go to great pains to try and help you achieve that.
Basic planning matters
Apart from making sure you’re compliant and so do not incur the wrath of HMRC, we look carefully at areas such as
Benefits in kind or salary,
Making sure you use your personal tax reliefs fully and efficiently
Minimising capital gains
Efficient use of pension contributions
And we make sure that together we consider things like:
Paying salary instead of dividends
Whether the business is better as a company or a sole trader or partnership
Whether you can employ your partner or spouse in the business and at what level
and similar matters.
We also consider any allowances you can take advantage of, such as child tax credit and working tax credit, whether you can utilise some tax relief for your home, and any potential inheritance tax issues and planning.
Investments and savings
We can also, whilst looking at your overall tax affairs and your tax return, think about your investments and savings and whether they can be better utilised and whether all the tax advantages available have been considered.
Some ideas for you to think about
Make sure you keep digital records of business mileage with the dates and the purpose so that we can easily reclaim your travel costs.
Be sure to review your pension arrangements annually with your financial advisor. It’s not just about the tax advantages, it’s whether you’re going to have a good retirement.
Is there the opportunity to pay a partner or spouse a salary if they are working in the business and their income is at a lower tax rate than yours?
Is it worthwhile transferring some capital and income between husband and wife because that’s without any tax liabilities, including inheritance tax. That can balance out your income levels and lead to an overall reduction in income tax for the family.
Let’s round up
There’s more to tax than simply producing a tax return that’s compliant and keeps HMRC happy. It’s useful to talk to us before you action any new financial transactions because there may be tax consequences and sometimes advantages that we can help you with.
Feel free to call us to discuss. We are keen that you minimise tax and maximise the benefits for you now and in the future. We want to see you survive and thrive.
Business tax strategies
You’ll be keen to minimise the overall tax burden, both business tax and personal tax.
If you are shareholder as well as director, there’s a lot of scope in deciding how profits should be withdrawn. This starts with deciding the balance of salary and dividends. This isn’t simply a tax exercise, as we have to consider the validity of dividends under company law, whether there is a possible effect on the company’s credit rating, and your intentions in the future regarding a new mortgage, as examples.
Please give us warning if you’re considering a change, whether you’re moving house and need a new mortgage, or some other major lifestyle change which would impact how much and how you take money out of the business.
Dividend planning has more implications than simply taking a salary but can often produce a saving. If not in tax, in National Insurance, as a salary has employers and employees’ contributions. If you pay over PAYE to HMRC for your employees every month, you may notice that the NIC payment is virtually the same or more than the tax element. It’s worth managing this for owner directors.
We have to also consider the corporation tax rates before and after dividends, whether there is an impact on death in service benefits, pensions another potential salary related insurance products.
If all shareholders do not qualify for dividends, we may need to realign the share structure to accommodate this. This is quite a simple exercise and creates a great deal of flexibility in the future.
We also need to consider longer term financial planning aspects to make sure that your individual personal financial planning needs are met, and the business is left in a resilient position and able to justify a good valuation when you come to sell it.
Let’s round up
The manner in which you are paid by your company has a number of implications which impact the company’s and your personal tax position. It also impacts your ability to maintain or enhance remuneration levels and fulfil your own personal objectives over the medium to long term.
It’s important that you understand the basics and inform us well in advance of any proposed change. Please do call us to discuss this more.
Retirement planning
You want a long and happy retirement, able to do all the things that you want to do. It needs early planning.
When do you want to retire, and so you expect to sell the business?
In which case what sort of buyer have you in mind, do you expect to sell some property?
What size of pension are you expecting at retirement, and what portfolio of investments?
We can work together to deal with these and other questions, to maximise the returns over your time scales. We have tools that will help in providing some parameters and scope to achieve this.
Your business
We also need to consider the value of the business and how you will extract that, and that needs early planning as well. Commonly, we will want to present to any potential buyer steadily rising profits and a strong balance sheet over the last three to five years. Buyers also tend to want a business that’s easy to run. So should you, as you’re expending time and effort in running it prior to the sale.
Early discussions
So, depending on your time scale, we need to talk about retirement planning in terms of pensions probably early in your business career, even if you do not make pension contributions immediately.
And later on, we need to talk about whether the pension pot and investments are growing at the right rate, and within five to seven years before sale, we need to talk about preparing your business for sale so that we can maximise the result.
We will also talk about the tax implications of the sale and how to structure that efficiently, whether that means capital gains or income tax, and how we might extract value from the business prior to sale that can boost your pension pot but not detract from the valuation.
Maintain focus
It’s important to be immersed in the day-to-day necessity of earning enough to live on, but it’s equally important to raise your eyes to the horizon and make sure that you are achieving your overall goals.
It’s worthwhile discussing this at least annually even if briefly, and for some of the elements it should be discussed in detail before any major changes are contemplated.
We would also discuss at that point with you any inheritance tax implications and the provisions of your will to make sure that everything goes where you want it to go in a tax efficient way during your lifetime and thereafter.
Let’s round up
It’s worthwhile discussing with us regularly where you’re going and how you intend to get there so that we can ensure that happens. Please give us a call if we’ve not talked about this recently. We want to see you survive and thrive.
Exit planning
At some point, enough will be enough, and you will want to stop running your business.
The method and timing of your exit, and the value of the business, and how you dispose of it, needs a good deal of thought well in advance of the event.
Methods of sale
You might want to sell it to your team, and there are some relatively tax efficient ways of doing that. That might involve selling the whole thing at once, retaining some of it and drawing an income, or selling part now and part later.
You might also want to explore a trade sale. That is a sale to a competitor or to someone who has complementary products and services and who can integrate your business into theirs.
If the business is large and growing fast, you might want to explore selling shares to investors through one of the main or smaller markets, such as the Stock Exchange or the Alternative Investment Market. This is rare, and expensive, but can reap big rewards.
Each solution brings its own tax challenges, and we would need to explore with you how to best take advantage of them.
The best solution for you involves getting the best net of tax position so there is a commercial balance to be struck between the best value and minimising tax. We do not allow the tax tail to wag the commercial dog.
Preparation for sale
Ideally you need to start five years before you sell, to give you two years to get everything in place, and then three years of steady growth to show your prospective buyers. The other thing buyers are interested in is a business which is easy to run, where everybody knows what to do and they can just step in and run it. That means working on the systems, procedures, workflows, and training to ensure that you are best positioned to maximise the sale proceeds. It also makes it easier to run for you. Not a bad result as you near retirement or sale.
Routes to market
You also need to consider who you will entrust with selling your business. Perhaps you will advertise yourself, or you can use a specialist agent. Some of them charge a large upfront fee win or lose, but with a success fee on top, and some have smaller up front fees but larger success fees. We have experience in dealing with business transfer agents, and we can advise you which is best for your circumstances. Again, it’s useful to engage them early on, and certainly within three years of eventual sale.
It’s quite possible that the sale process will take more than a year, so you need to be aware of that and plan accordingly. And you also need to plan what you are going to do with the money!
Let’s round up
Exiting the business is a once in a lifetime event. It needs a good deal of care and planning well in advance of putting it on the market. Our job is to help you maximise this part of your journey so that you achieve what you want, not just for the sale, but for your life afterwards.
Please call to discuss this if you have any thoughts of selling in the medium term.
Valuations
We have produced valuations for:
Divorce and separation, sometimes as expert witness for the court
Transfer of shares, both between family members, and introducing new working shareholders Sale of the business.
And, commonly, annually for clients who wish to track the speed and trajectory of growth of the business, as well as its profitability.
Transfer of shares
As time passes, it is often the case that new family members come into the business and over time want to acquire some shares. This has the benefit of moving wealth between generations and gets the younger generation more engaged. This has obvious tax implications, as it is likely to trigger an event for capital gains tax. This can be avoided with gift relief, which is a holdover relief, or can provide a planning point in using up the annual capital gains exemption of the seller or gifter of the shares. Both require a valuation to support any enquiry from HMRC. But as a mechanism, it can be very effective.
It is also common for new nonfamily shareholders when the business growth can be accelerated by selling some shares, or transferring them one way or another, to somebody who will provide more management resource and expertise. This also needs evaluation, and you should involve a commercial lawyer to draw up a shareholders’ agreement so the rights and obligations of everybody are described in detail and protected.
Sale of the business
At some point there will be an exit of one sort or another, which will be an outright sale to a third party, or perhaps a transfer of shares to employees’, all of which require a valuation and consideration of the tax implications.
Tracking growth
We often produce an annual valuation, on a very simple basis, as part of the annual accounts production. It’s there to inform you not just on the profitability but also on the amount and speed of growth because that helps with retirement planning, wealth management, and exit planning. And informs decision making so that there is some balance between the next years profitability and the overall growth of the business to achieve your overall objectives. It’s very quick and cheap exercise and the number it produces isn’t cast in stone. It’s the difference in the number and the speed of change which is more important.
Let’s round up
There are several reasons to value your business, and we think the most important one is to track the growth of the business over time so that your personal objectives are met. Let’s discuss how valuations can inform the decisions you make to ensure that your objectives are met.
Wealth planning
As a minimum, you want to make sure that your wealth overall grows so that you have enough to live on in a happy and healthy retirement. We want that for you too.
What do we mean by wealth planning?
We don’t mean that we are going to turn into your financial advisor. That’s a different skill set, selecting which pension provider and where you should put your money and monitoring that. Financial advisors tend to deal with your personal wealth, not your business wealth.
We deal with your business wealth, and we need to incorporate elements of your personal wealth as well to make sure that your objectives are met. We do this in a simple annual update session which takes about two hours initially, and then rather less as all we need to do is talk about changes. We will ask you to list what you and your partner own, what is joint property, in fact all your assets and any liabilities and we will bring in a business valuation as well.
We then discuss with you what might happen over the next five years to see whether the business and your personal wealth will grow sufficiently given your risk appetite, your ages, and your objectives.
If that needs some adjustment, then we can discuss this, and you can take this back to your financial advisor, if you need to. Otherwise, if all seems well, we will merely review this in 12 months’ time.
Benefits to you
Everything is brought together so that you can see it all in one place, discuss how it may change, and what you might do about it. This is a discussion about how you can change your personal wealth assets and any liabilities, as well as the business ones so that everything works together to fit to your objectives.
It gives you clarity, focus, and action points so that you feel much more in control of your own destiny.
Let’s round up
You need to be in control of how your business and personal assets, working together, fit to what you need them to do to secure your future. This is our overall objective for you as well. We are very happy to discuss this whenever suits you.
Strategic planning
Why plan if it’s all going to change? And the simple answer is because it’s all going to change. You need to know what those changes mean and how they fit into your objectives, as they happen, not well after the event.
We don’t believe that plans should be set in stone. They are meaningless and you shouldn’t waste your time and money on them. You need plans that are agile, flexible, and resilient to match your business. Plans that will cope with the unexpected and put you in a position to exploit opportunities and mitigate risks.
Ultimately, this is about your objectives as a person which the business helps fulfil. So, we take some time and trouble to find out what your personal goals are and then we adjust the business with you to achieve them. All the while making sure that the business is agile, flexible, and resilient.
Tools and methods
We don’t believe that there is a one-size-fits-all tool or method that allows you to achieve everything you want. We’ve talked before about most business books have a panacea that works for everything. They don’t. Everything needs designing from the ground up to fit your particular business and your particular circumstances. That does not mean it’s time consuming and expensive. It means that we stick to first principles. And we make the tools and methods fit to the business, not the other way round.
Planning
We have tried and tested means of doing this. We will look at your personal objectives in some depth, then what the business does now, where and who its market is, what it can do in the future and what resource will be needed to do so.
This will drive a series of objectives which we will plot on a 10 by 10 grid to show what we need to do with you now, what can be safely left, and what will probably never happen because circumstances will overtake it.
From this is derived an action plan of who is going to do what and by when. Planning is a waste of time if it is not implemented, and so we will have regular review meetings with you to adjust the plan where we need to, celebrate successes, mitigate any problems, and make sure that the plan is still producing what you need it to. This works. We think it’s essential, and in times of economic difficulty, critically important.
This is what ties together the business value, your day-to-day needs, and your eventual happiness and well-being.
Let’s round up
Properly done, planning is flexible and allows you to take advantage of opportunities and reduce risks. It allows you to achieve your goals, so that you end up with a happy and fulfilled life. That is our goal for you, helping you to survive and thrive.
Business plans and forecasts
You may like to know that we’re not the biggest fans of plans and forecasts, unless they are flexible. See strategic planning!
But you do often need to evaluate your business models and assumptions to make sure that everything hangs together, and you understand it so that you make day-to-day decisions better. A good business model will list all the assumptions inherent in the business so that you can do some scenario planning. This puts you ahead of the curve so that should something come in from left field, you know how it’s going to affect you immediately. This early warning saves you a lot of money.
Forecasts
A forecast is a prediction of what you think is going to happen. For example, I think I’m going to sell 10 televisions a month at £500 each. It mostly deals with external events. The assumption behind that could be I will sell 3 in my shop, 4 in the next town, and 3 online. Each of those assumptions has a different cost. From this you can build up a sales forecast and the cost of those sales.
Business plans
A plan is a series of forecasts put together, and then sense checked to make sure that the whole thing hangs together logically. For example, you may be selling your 10 televisions, but you have also assumed you need a shop which is going to cost you 50% of your sales a month. Once you put the plan together, you can see that you will be making a loss so you will change some of the cost lines and the way of working to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Then there are budgets. A budget goes through your profit and loss account line by line allocating what you think is going to be spent month by month. That is what you measure against what actually happens, and then you can reflect upon whether your model works or which parts of it you need to change. You will have data that tells you whether your forecasts are correct, and whether your cost lines in your plan are correct. They won’t be all correct, but you can adjust your way of working frequently to match what your reality is, as the world changes.
Because of this plans and forecasts have their place. They are a very good thing to hang off the back of your strategic planning activity. The strategic plan is your high level look at where you want to be and how you want to get there, and then you break it down through the forecasts, plans and budgets to achieve that.
Let’s round up
The more control you have over your business, especially in difficult times, the more likely you are to make it through, and able to take advantage of increased market share when the good times come back. You can survive and thrive.
Virtual finance director
We can act as your finance director. That means we get involved in your planning and forecasting, help to produce the models, critically evaluate them, monitor the results, and help you make better decisions.
As businesses grow, the amount of time that the owner can devote to aspects of the business becomes more limited. You need to spend the right time in the right area and not in the weeds. So, it’s often better to outsource things like the bookkeeping and payroll, and some of the financial control aspects. You still have ultimate control, but whatever you can delegate, you should. It buys you back time to do the necessary thinking and planning to protect the business and help it grow.
What we can do
Apart from the monitoring and control aspects, and help with planning, you have a resource you can call on every month for a fixed fee. That resource has a lot of business experience, and even more in finance, costing, debtor management and cash management. A good VFD can do in a tenth of the time what you can do. We can save you time and money. We will obviously also make sure that the bookkeeping and annual accounts are super smooth so saving time and money in that area too. Even if we are not doing it ourselves.
We believe a good VFD will be able to understand the needs of each technical area of the business and bring them together to make sure everything is working along the same lines to the same objectives. In fact, we think a good VFD should be a generalist as well as a specialist and that is what we are.
Let’s round up
Your time is limited and is likely to get more so either because of growth, or because of a tough economic climate. Someone who can get through the numbers, who can plan and understand them and give you advice so that you can make confident timely decisions is essential. Our job is to help you survive and thrive.
Cash management
Cash is king. Businesses don’t fail because they are unprofitable. They fail because they run out of cash. Managing cash is another essential activity. It is especially critical when the business is going through a growth phase, or when the economic climate is difficult.
Working capital
It’s all about managing the working capital cycle. Business owners are generally very good at thinking about profitability but don’t take too much notice of the balance sheet. This has stock, debtors, (people who owe you), bank balances and creditors, (people who you owe), as well as amounts you owe HMRC for PAYE & VAT.
Managing how those interact and trying to speed up the cycle from buying stock, selling the stock, getting the money in so that you can pay suppliers and leave some for yourself is always an interesting exercise.
The key to working capital management is to try and get that cycle going faster rather than having to pump money into the system to buy more stock or to support more debtors. There are ways and means of doing this, and commonly when we do a business plan, we incorporate a cash plan into it to see whether that also hangs together with all the other forecasts and assumptions. And we test it to see whether, for example what effect it has on cash if customers pay after 60 days instead of 30. Again, it’s about predicting what might happen so that when it starts to happen you have early warning, and you can react appropriately.
This means day to day credit control, negotiating with suppliers for better deals, ensuring that financing solutions fit the business needs, and rigorous stock control.
We’ve got access to over 100 financing solutions, so, we can sense check your existing finance deals to make sure they are a good fit, and often refinance them.
Regular management
It needs managing regularly and with good timely information. Which means bookkeeping should be up to date and accurate. That’s the basis for any sensible business decision. Then matching what is happening to what you think is going to happen or should have happened gives you the ability to change your future to your benefit, whether that is mitigating risks, or exploiting opportunities. Even in a downturn, opportunities abound for the business which has the cash to exploit them.
We have the tools and expertise to crunch this quickly so that you have information on hand when you need to make decisions and we have the expertise to interpret and guide you in your decision making.
Let’s round up
It is game over if you run out of cash. But with sufficient cash reserves, there will be opportunities to take. Good day-to-day cash management allows you to survive and thrive.
Create your own help sheets
It’s quite possible that all your customers don’t know all the products and services that you offer. It would be very annoying if some of your customers bought things from your competitors which you could be supplying.
Given that times are tough and we’re expecting them to get tougher, it’s important that you get the most out of your customer base. After all it’s much easier to sell to existing customers than to get new ones who don’t know you.
But first, make sure that your service is excellent. Pick up the phone or talk to your major customers and find out what they like about you, and what you can do better. Also ask them what their concerns are because you may be able to help them with that.
You also can send them help sheets so that they are aware what you can do for them.
How to do it
Each help sheet should identify a possible concern, provide some education and some potential solutions, and invite your customer to discuss it with you more.
It’s best to do this in a systemised way. There are two ways of doing this.
- Send the help sheet list to customers via e-mail or letter
- Have the help sheet list available in reception to hand to customers as they arrive for a meeting. Or, when you go to meet them.
Implementation
Dear customer
Apart from the xxxx that you usually buy from us, we offer a few other products and services.
Many customers have asked us for these (products and services), and to help you we have developed (7) help sheets specifically for you.
If you are interested in any of them, please just e-mail us back highlighting the ones you’re most interested in and we will send them to you by return.
Reception
On arrival, and after offering your customer a coffee etc, give them the list of help sheets on a clipboard or something similar and ask them to tick the ones they are interested in and then hand them the help sheets. Make sure that the person meeting them keeps the list that they have ticked.
Developing the help sheets
Go through your customer list and identify what they have bought from you in the last year. There will be some items which are bought rarely but still provide a contribution for you.
When looking through your customer list, it may occur to you that some customers who buy this from you, might also want to buy that other product. Apart from help sheets, this gives you better information for targeting marketing offers. You can be quite direct in an email – “I see you buy (this) from us. Did you know that you can also buy (that)? If you bought them together, as we save on delivery costs we can sell (that) to you for (10%) off.”
But back to the help sheets
Help sheets are there to be helpful. There may be uses that some of your products and services can be put to that some customers may not be aware of. Describe what problem your product or service is designed to solve, and some alternative way of solving it which might inform your customer, save them money, or save them time. Then describe what other products complement that product.
If all your customers buy the main items that you sell, you don’t need a help sheet for these. You want help sheets for the things which complement them which they may not be aware of. Also, your help sheets develop in your customers mind the fact that you are experts in your field, helpful, and available to talk to. More conversations equals more sales.
Let’s round up
We are keen to see you survive and thrive, and we will do everything we can to help you.
If you need help with segmenting your customer base, your products, and the gross margin for each product, then that’s what we’re good at. We are always happy to talk this through with you.