Sin number 16 - Not getting advice from experts
By Greg Carroll
There are so many aspects to business that you almost have to become a jack of all trades. The reality is however you can never be an expert in all areas and to do so would take you away from focusing on making your businesses successful. Therefore if you want to see your business succeed, at some point you are going to need external advice. The cost of this advice can vary from profession to profession but I never think of it terms of what it costs me, I think in terms of the overall value it adds to my business.
There is little doubt that the business structure my accountant proposed when I first set up my business has saved me tax and improved my businesses flexibility. Had it been left to me I may have got it wrong. Here are just some of the experts you should surround with:
- Accountant
- Solicitor
- Financial planner
- Finance broker
- Business coach or advisor
- Advertising or marketing consultant
- Insurance broker
- Public relations advisor
- IT consultant
You may not need all these people all the time, but I would suggest that the first five on the list are ones that you should be talking to on a reasonably regular basis. You should be discussing with your accountant how to structure particular expenditure and then getting your finance broker to source you the lowest cost funds with the highest amount of flexibility available.
While advisors will charge a fee, you have to remember that the benefits can far outweigh the costs:
- This is what they do for a living. So it means they have probably seen a situation like yours 100 times before and can quickly identify solutions to your problems, which can save you a great deal of stress and time.
- They can generally find a way to either save you money or improve your results that will substantially exceed the cost of their fee. As an example, through restructuring of a client's personal and business finances I was able to save this particular client over $10,000 in repayments per annum.
Of course it's important to have the right advisors working for you. There are plenty of people out there in all these industries that will always give you bad advice. Seeking out a good advisor can be quite a process and not one which I am going to cover in this book, but a good start point is to talk to other people to see who they have dealt with and would recommend. I suggest getting a list of at least two or three for each of these areas and then having a chat to sound them out and get an understanding of how they can help you.
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