How to add company value and not lose it again
All companies look to create more value and grow quickly, particularly at the early stages of a new company’s life. The ways in which this goal can be achieved is through a bit of planning and consultation with some business professionals. Provided the business idea is solid and addresses a market need, we can develop a clear road map and generate lots of value:
Branding
- Determine who is your target audience, and be specific, you will need to tailor the message to address their needs.
- Describe the ideal customer. Understand their persona
It may be that narrowing your customer focus will give you a distinct competitive advantage, which means the brand message comes across really very clearly.
Research other brands in your industry
The real value adds in branding is to have a differentiator in your product offering over the competition and convince customers to purchase your product over theirs. What are the key qualities and benefits that your brand offers?
Create a brand logo and strapline
The logo and strapline should appear on everything the company does. It’s the visual identity or calling card of your company. It is worthwhile investing some time and money in developing this logo and using a branding agency to help you stand out from the crowd with a timeless badge of recognition Arguably your website is the most important marketing tool you will have for your business and your brand. This is where consumers will learn about your business and understand its vision. The experience has to be exceptional, fast loading, mobile-friendly and easy to use if you are to gain any traction from potential clients SEO – Search Engine Optimisation is the most effective way of driving traffic to your website. The content of the website will have those keywords that your customers use when surfing the web and drive traffic to your business Blogging also features highly as a marketing tool for your brand.
Paid advertising
PPC – Pay Per Click can be an effective marketing tool to drive traffic to your web site. Usually, there are defined words that your potential clients will be using to search out a vendor they are looking to use. The more tailored the wording is to your potential market audience, the more likely those people are likely to visit your web site and buy your product.
Business Planning
Business planning is a great way of adding value to a business. By looking forward into the future gives the entrepreneur the ability to manage the business with greater confidence. The entrepreneur starts to manage the business with facts and figures rather than gut feel To the outside world, such as banks or investors, a business plan shows great foresight and demonstrates the company has considered all the risks and opportunities that lie ahead.
Diversify Your Customer Base
Generally speaking, it’s better to have a diverse customer base than reliance upon a handful of clients. This obviously depends on where you are in the business life cycle: An early start-up can have few clients, which is OK. Those early clients can be very supportive of new business with consistent payments and orders, but generally speaking, relying on a handful of clients can be risky in the long term
Scalability
Scalability is a very attractive feature for a company. Scalability is different from growth. Growth is increasing in size with a commensurate increase in cost to achieve that growth. Scalability is taking advantage of a market growth situation, but increasing costs only marginally.
Legal Compliance
One thing that is changing for sure in the UAE is the increase in compliance each company is expected to adopt. There has always been licensing, but now we have VAT which has forced all eligible small businesses to operate with an increased level of financial rigor. It’s wise to have an accounting system that can cope with the collection of data for the quarterly returns. The invoices to your customers have to be compliant with the law.
Competent Management Team
Investors looking at a target firm will consider many factors, and one of the most significant factors is that of the management team. Having the right management team who are qualified to do the job adds enormous value to any business. A company is, after all, nothing without the people.
Legal Structure and Optimisation
To gain the most personal protection we strongly advise that your business is set up through a limited liability company (LLC). This affords the entrepreneur protection With early start-ups, the usual funding rounds are with friends and family and invariably both parties overvalue their input leading to eventual conflict and value leakage later on. We always recommend that all start-up companies get everything in writing, do not rely upon handshake deals, everything has to be documented formally.
VAT and Accounting Rigor
VAT was introduced in the UAE on 1st January 2019. This has forced those companies that needed to be VAT registered to adopt a level of accounting rigor they probably never experienced before. In fact, it’s really difficult to be VAT compliant without some sort of accounting system. We run many VAT health checks with all sized companies throughout the region and the one universal point we note is that those companies that didn’t seek help initially are incompliant in at least one respect. The FTA has just employed over 1,000 inspectors to audit all firms within the UAE. We can see many fines and penalties being levied, all of which are compounding into even bigger fines and penalties as we speak!
How do you know what your company is worth?
Valuation is the process of determining economic value and reflects the financial performance of the company both historically and in the future. Of course, the final value of any company will be the price a buyer is willing to pay for the business. Most investors look at discounted cash flows to ascertain the value of an investment, but this is an indicative arithmetic calculation but won’t take into account the strategic nature of purchase for example. Owning and running a business is never easy, but as we can see, there are ways we can make the journey simpler, more predictable and fun. Having a product people want, a business plan to measure against, being rigorous in applying good practice and surrounding yourself with people that know what they are doing is a recipe for future growth, success, and significant value add.
Who we are
Re/think is a boutique accounting, regulatory and compliance, VAT advisory, audit, HR consultancy, recruitment, and business advisory firm. We specialize in assisting SME clients with cost-effective, high-quality services and solutions. We create value by investing in highly qualified and motivated people and working closely with leading industry partners to provide our clients with a one-stop-shop for all of their business support.
This support ranges from our core services to CFO and board-level advisory for the sectors and markets we serve. Our ability to add value reaches across business size, as our offering can be adapted to startups through to large complex firms.
For entrepreneurs and international businesses please see “Sectors”, “Startup Hub”, as well as “Our Services” to see how we can help you today.
For Venture Capital, Private Equity, Family Offices, Corporate Services providers and Law Firms, please see “Sectors” as well as “Our Services” to see how our service offering can be tailored to your needs to create a long-term partnership for your own firm and for your clients.
For fund managers, FinTech’s, payment solution providers, crypto exchanges, and other regulated activities please see our regulatory and compliance services “Our Services” pages.