Posted: 06 June 2017

Sourcing Grants for SMEs Is Good Business Sense!

Good for your small/medium enterprise clients who want to access grants so as to improve their business activities with a subsidy from the government.

Good for accountants to show your SME clients that you are proactive and acting as the SMEs' “trusted advisor” to assist them to get a grant to improve their businesses by adding value.

If it’s good for small/medium enterprises and good for accountants why do so many accountants ignore their small/medium enterprise clients desire to know about government grants and, more importantly, the business improvements that your client would have been able to undertake at a significantly cheaper cost because of the grant?

Whilst at the same time depriving your accountancy business team of the opportunity to undertake some interesting work assignments (“real accountants work”) that approximately 50% of the accountancy firm’s fee has been paid for by governments.

There are a number of opportunities for accountants arising out of the Crowd-Sourced Funding legislation with the first listings on intermediaries' platforms (website) scheduled from 29th September 2017. Now is the time to get prepared to assist your clients and prospects to be able to avail themselves of this unique opportunity to be able to raise capital from the “crowd”. At this stage Crowd-Sourced Funding is only available for unlisted public companies. The legislation enables propriety limited companies to be converted to an unlisted public company. Whilst there has been some debate about the requirement for companies to be unlisted public companies, some people with considerable experience in the process of raising capital for small companies are very supportive of the concept that capital is to be raised by unlisted public companies primarily because of the structure of public companies, corporate governance requirements and constitutions that reflect that the shareholders will be more than family and friends which is normally the case within a proprietary limited company.?rel=0&showinfo=0" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen">

Besides assisting small medium enterprises with the grant applications the interesting work that grants involve include:

Business Plans
Budgets
Cashflow Forecasts
Management Mentoring
Corporate Governance
Board of Directors/Advice Meeting Procedures

Some accountants have told me they haven’t got the time or resources to worry about grants!

I find this an astounding statement. If an accountant is the “trusted advisor” to a small/medium enterprise surely any commercial service, that the client requires and the accountant has the appropriate qualifications and licenses to perform, then the accountant should be offering to perform the services on behalf of their client.

Needing a license to undertake grant work is not an excuse because government grants do not require a special license to assist a small/medium enterprise to find a grant that might be suitable for them.

Quite rightly small/medium enterprises are inclined to be a little bit upset if they find out that a competitor has been able to source a government grant which presumably gives them an advantage in the marketplace and yet their accountant, their “trusted advisor”, has not told them that such a grant exists; which could have significantly contributed to an improvement in the SME's business operations.

An accountancy business has a significant amount of knowledge on the client therefore the completion of a profile which takes three minutes to enter and then about 10 minutes to review the preliminary grant questionnaires; surely this is not too big an ask for an accountancy business to perform on behalf of loyal small/medium enterprise clients.

I encourage every accountancy business that is offering a proactive grant service to promote that they do proactively source government grants for their small/medium enterprise clients to the wider business community on an ongoing basis.

Why, because this is “market differentiation". Differentiation is going to become more and more important for accountants to maintain their standard of living in the future.

An interesting key performance indicator is – “what value of grants did your clients receive last year as compared to the year before and how much work did your accountancy business generate from your clients who you were able to assist to obtain government grants”?

I know some businesses around Australia where both figures are very significant.

If you are scoring nil or low figures on both of these key performance indicators this means that your clients and your firm are missing out!

Clients are missing out on their share of the three billion dollars each year that the Australian, State and Territory governments allocate as government grants to small/medium enterprises.

How much longer will your clients put up with that?

I would like to invite you to participate in a special webinar “Sourcing Grants for Clients Is Good Business Sense” on Monday, 12 June 2017 at 12.30pm (AEST). To register to participate in this webinar, please click here.

Please click here if you would like a copy of a special article “Using Government Grants”.

If you have any questions on any of the services offered by ESS BIZTOOLS, ESS BASIP or ESS BIZGRANTS please do not hesitate to contact us at or phone 1800 232 088.

www.essbiztools.com.au

www.essbasip.com.au

www.essbizgrants.com.au

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Episode 113 - Sourcing Grants for SMEs Is Good Business Sense!

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As their trusted advisor, can you assist your SME clients with business advisory services?

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