Business Review Programme

Get started with the right plan

Good business is about collaboration. This can involve a wide variety of people, with a range of ideas, motives and backgrounds. But, misalignment (when these ideas do not come together) can stop your business from growing. To address this, we've created the BDO Business Review Programme, which seeks to measure the degree of alignment in your business. This will give you a snapshot of exactly where your organisation is at today, so you can better drive where you're going tomorrow.

Who is it for?

The BDO Business Review Programme is aimed at small to medium-sized, independently managed enterprises, with multiple owners who are highly involved in the decision-making process. This can include not-for-profits, but they should have a reasonable level of professional management.

If your business has been going well for a while now, but you're looking to start the next phase, the BDO Business Review Programme is the perfect tool for you. Whether you want to achieve significant growth, develop an exit strategy or simply focus on de-risking and maintaining market share, it helps to find out where your business is currently sitting, and to what degree you and the other stakeholders are aligned on certain issues.

Furthermore, the Business Review Programme can help to uncover any weaknesses or blind spots in your organisation. It's essential before taking your business onto the next phase that you both clarify and fix the issues that you currently have, and this is near-impossible without the comprehensive review that BDO offers.

External and independent advice is important, particularly if there's a high degree of misalignment between stakeholders. It's hard to get that if you're not yet at the level where you can afford a board of independent directors, and this is something that the BDO Business Review Programme can provide. We've been helping businesses of this scale and type for years, and now we have a formal mechanism for it, we're hoping to begin even stronger long-term client relationships.

How does it work?

The first stage of the process involves each stakeholder filling out a questionnaire. There's a short version which will give you a diagnostic and a heat map showing where the areas of pressure are. There's also a longer questionnaire which might take an hour to complete but will really dig down into the finer details of your business. This part of the process will work best if each stakeholder fills out the form independently of the others.

From this, we'll be able to see where the key points of tension are in the business. We'll run a diagnostic and create a tailored report for the client, including a heat map that will highlight these key pressure points and the degree of alignment on each one.

The programme doesn't stop there, however. As part of our advisory role, our Partners will sit down with you and talk through these issues so that, together, we can create a tailored solution that will allow your business to move forward. The Business Review Programme can assist businesses to solve a whole range of issues, including:

At BDO we care about our clients and the ongoing relationships we have with them, which means we'll normally set up follow up meetings after the initial programme has been completed. In these, we'll discuss your business' Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and whether they're still in line with the plan of action we've agreed to in the Business Review Programme.

What are the outcomes of the BDO Business Review Programme?

We can't stress enough how this is a tailored process. The answers to the questionnaire will help to give us a deep understanding of the nuances of your business, and it's from here that we can build an ongoing relationship to help your organisation grow and succeed. You may not know exactly what issues your business is facing but the Business Review Programme is here to help you discover them, set them out on the table and overcome them.

We're more than just accountants. We're here to help your business grow. For more information on the BDO Business Review Programme, please contact the team today.