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Alan Weiss Testimonial for Phil

We help bankers to grow their business by growing their clients’ businesses. Our services can help your clients strengthen their businesses and qualify for more financing by:

  • Creating timely and reliable financial reports to meet banker reporting requirements.
  • Improving your clients’ business planning and control processes.
  • Developing robust plans for profitable and controlled growth that leverage new debt.
  • Formalizing and strengthening management discipline to reduce risk.
  • Generating sustainable profits and cash flow to service debt.
  • Reducing risk by implementing risk management and succession plans.
  • Improving client communication so your clients see you as a strategic partner in their long-term success.

Phil’s work was key in the successful financing of clients’ growth plans. Our clients were able to achieve their financial goals and objectives, and the bank was able to lend into a risk-reduced opportunity. — Ryan McLean, Business Development Bank of Canada

 

Phil helps his clients – high growth companies requiring unconventional financing – borrow wisely. — Doug Yaremko, Scotiabank

For more information or to arrange a presentation for your lending team, please contact Phil Symchych at 1-306-569-9111 or by email at info@symcoandco.com.

Here are services that we can provide to your clients to help them obtain additional financing.

Financing your Business

We provide the access and acceptance to key financial relationships that will provide important resources without surrendering control.

We help you obtain the right kind of financing for your business and your comfort level. By structuring debt and equity properly, we can accelerate your business growth, maximize business value, and increase your wealth.

Phil has a breadth of expertise and experience that helped us buy a railroad and expand our business. We highly recommend Phil’s services if you need help with growing your business, financing, negotiating shareholder agreements and even creating ownership structures. — Sheldon Affleck, Mobil Grain Ltd.

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Some of our services:

  • Symco & Co. Financing Binder™
  • Buying or selling a business.
  • Structuring management buy-ins or buy-outs.
  • Negotiating with bankers and investors.
  • Financial projections and forecasts.
  • Business plans.
  • Wealth creation and protection strategies and structures.
  • Maximizing your business value for transition, succession or sale.

Entrepreneurs run their businesses from their income statements and cash flow. Yet bankers lend based on the balance sheet, management credibility and overall financial performance. Symco & Co. can help to bridge the gap between what you need as a business owner and what the banker needs to make lending decisions.

Cash is king! More important than the cash is the relationship with your banker who controls the cash. Symco & Co. are experts in banker relationships because we have something in common with bankers. We talk banker talk: EBITA, free cash flow, debt to equity, working capital, days interest coverage, risk management, succession planning, revenue diversity, and our favorite, weighted average cost of capital.

The biggest factors affecting your chances at obtaining financing are your existing cash flow and your management skills.

Many accountants recommend minimizing taxes, yet this hurts your balance sheet and reduces your ability to ability to borrow and grow your business. You need a growth strategy that builds your balance sheet to attract bankers, not a tax-minimizing strategy that actually weakens your balance sheet and repels bankers. Our Symco Financing Proposals™ are very thorough and help to increase banker confidence and commitment to your business success.

Business Planning

We design and implement pragmatic strategies that build your business daily instead of building binders on a shelf.

Symco & Co. helps you to create a mythical creature: the effective, accurate business plan. It’s the process of preparing a business plan that is the most valuable. We act as a guide and provide proprietary templates and processes that can accelerate your business planning process. Business plans often lack strategic innovation and marketing momentum. Yours won’t. Symco & Co. incorporates our powerful strategy and marketing planning tools into your own business planning process so you can achieve maximum clarity and direction in minimum time.

A lot of planners work more on the surface. Phil is more specific. He helps you develop your business philosophy, not just a business plan. — Monte Stewart, McCrank Stewart Johnson Law Firm

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Some of our services:

  • Business plans to chart a profitable course amidst numerous choices, enhance business value, and strengthen management’s control and confidence about the future.
  • Financing plans to structure your business for maximum value and wealth creation, attract debt and equity, obtain fuel for growth and expansion, and preserve your equity and control.
  • Marketing plans to clearly communicate your unique value points, develop innovative pricing structures that maximize margins, enhance your brand and strengthen customer loyalty.

Projections and Forecasts

There is art and science in business forecasts, and we develop the former while teaching the latter.

Many business owners shudder to hear the banker request financial projections or forecasts. Yet the banker expects, legitimately, that the owner has a reasonable idea of their future.

A key to business success is planning ahead. Planning doesn’t restrict your future options, it enhances them by intentionally aligning your resources around your top priorities. You can always change your mind and respond to changing conditions or new market opportunities, just like a pilot will change his flight path to avoid storms. But the pilot starts with a flight plan to ensure he has enough fuel to make the trip.

It’s not the projections that are the most important, it’s the planning process and creation of assumptions that will propel your business to success. Projections are the financial dashboard where you compare your actual performance against your plan and allow you to make mid-course adjustments.

The most important projections and forecasts include operations, marketing and financial information:

  • Operational capacity and expected production, so that you can allocate your fixed and variable costs into your pricing. This allows you to determine your overhead rates at different levels of production and price aggressively.
  • Revenue projections, based on your marketing plan.
  • Cash flow planning, showing cash inflows from customers (timing of receivables) and cash outflows (for debt servicing, accounts payable, and regular expenses for payroll and overheads).

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First, some definitions. A forecast assumes that your business will continue in a similar manner based on the past…more of the same, so to speak. A projection, on the other hand, includes a new scenario that will impact your business performance. This could include the purchase of a new machine, expansion into a new market, acquisition of a competitor, or some other significant change to your business.

Major assumptions used in preparing financial projections include:

  • What are your costs per unit, variable and fixed, for your main products and services?
  • What is your operational capacity – hours, units? Can you add a second shift?
  • Will new equipment or technology increase capacity, decrease labour cost, increase quality?
  • What are the marketing estimates for unit sales and revenues?
  • What are the cash outflows for fixed expenses, variable expenses such as cost of sales, investment in equipment, debt servicing, dividends?
  • What are the short-term and long-term interest rates used to calculate your cost of debt and debt service?

For example, we recently worked with a client whose customer suddenly changed repayment terms from 30 days to 60 days. The projections were set up with a 30 day collection period. Changing this to 60 days showed that the client needed a higher operating line to carry the additional receivables that effectively doubled as their customer took twice as long to pay.

For large, public companies, the stock market rewards (or punishes) companies who meet or exceed (or miss) their earnings forecasts. Granted, forecasting your profits is a very difficult thing to do in business, but there are processes and tools that are highly effective. Taking a conservative approach is a critical success factor in this area.

Symco & Co. helps management to do the “heavy lifting” by preparing useful and relevant financial projections and forecasts that enhance decision making, control and confidence. This process is even more effective when departmental managers participate in creating their own budgets that flow up to the projection or forecast. Monitoring your actual performance against your projections will help you to identify positive and negative trends so you can respond quickly and enhance your performance.

Risk Management

We provide clear tools and assessments to identify, mitigate, and accept prudent risk.

Common risks in privately-held and owner-managed businesses:

  • Over-reliance on the business owner for major decisions, key relationships and leadership.
  • Cheque signing and contract or document execution when the owner is absent.
  • Key operational and management processes are not written down or are not updated.
  • Succession planning for key people at all levels of the company.
  • Short-term capacity to fill in for key people that are away unexpectedly.
  • Financial resources or financing to pursue unexpected opportunities or deal with short-term changes.
  • Computer backup — data, software and hardware.
  • Shopping your own business — to experience what your customers do.
  • Shopping your competitors — to stay on top of trends.
  • Working with your business advisors — lawyer, accountant, insurance – to ensure you are structured for success and protected from disaster.

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Small and medium businesses can learn a valuable lesson from large, and especially public, companies that have clear fiduciary duties to protect corporate and shareholder value by practicing risk management.

Business owners face unique risks. For example, the business value may be tied directly to the owner’s continued activity in the business, resulting in high personal goodwill but low value to a potential purchaser and therefore reduced family wealth. Symco & Co. helps help you anticipate, manage, and reduce the unique risks endemic to your type of business.