Event Management Business £4m sales and 35 staff

Issue

ECOVIS Wingrave Yeats advised this owner managed business on how to restructure their senior management team so that communication was improved.

Solution

We helped install a new financial management reporting system that would enable them to track their performance more intelligently. We helped them introduce process within their business model so that the excellent work that they were doing for their clients would allow them to work more efficiently and therefore to increase their profitability.

Currently

The company continues to prosper and has built a team that is well capable of dealing on its own with the key issues such as Succession and Scalability. We continue to advise on certain aspects of Tax Planning.

Testimonial

“We run an event management business and a year ago felt we were losing our way. Things were busy but they weren’t going the right way and we weren’t happy. The Directors were not working well together and it was obvious that there was an increasing amount of discontent among several of the people who work with us.
When we work well, we are brilliant at what we do; we have to be because we work for world class companies (HBOS, Carlsberg, BP). Looking back at it all, the problem was that we had grown too quickly (30 employees and £2m sales) and hadn’t adjusted to being that size. Systems were breaking down or didn’t exist and all the fun we used to have at work started disappearing.
Before we started talking to Christopher Jenkins of Ecovis Wingrave Yeats, we would never have dreamed of using an Accountant to help sort things out. The last thing we wanted was a man in a suit: our culture is unconventional and it is the way we do things that has made us one of the best in the Industry. Whoever it was who knew some of the answers would have to be the sort of person that understood us first!
We decided to take on Ecovis Wingrave Yeats, and Christopher did just that. There can’t be many accountants around who can walk into a business like ours, understand what the real problems are and then work with us to set about overcoming them. We didn’t expect an Accountant could stand up in front of everyone in the company and talk to them in a way that didn’t sound like text book gobbledegook. Actually what he did say, and the way in which he said it, made suggested change understandable to the whole workforce. The event caught everyone’s imagination mainly because he understood how to put across a very difficult message. That required a skill in understanding the people involved and how we all think, which I would imagine very few Accountants possess. We look back on that day as a turning point. Since then his role has been to help us build a management structure, financial reporting systems, install an HR programme and make us focus on where the business is heading. The evidence of what he achieved lies in the fact that we responded quickly to the remedies once a business professional had endorsed our path and indeed in the crucial fact that work is once again fun.”
Liz Bagnall
Managing Director