000-000-0000 · closed Sundays
The line that gets crossed most
Reading a set of financial statements and preparing one are two different jobs, and only one of them is ours. The same is true of noticing a legal question and answering it. Both distinctions sound pedantic until the week they matter.
Your accountant prepares the accounts. We read them. That sentence is the whole boundary and the two halves of it look similar from outside, so it is worth being specific about what each one contains.
In practice the boundary is easy to hold and it is held by a question: does the answer end up on a document somebody files? If it does, it is not ours, and the fact that we can see what the answer probably is does not change that.
We do not prepare or file your accounts. We read the financial statements your accountant prepares and work out what they say about the business. We do not prepare, compile, review or audit accounts, and we do not prepare or file a tax return — that is a licensed profession and a different one.
The most useful hour in a margin engagement is frequently the one with the owner, us and the accountant together — because the accountant has the numbers and the history, we have spent two weeks in the business, and the owner has been translating badly between the two for years. We turn up with the questions written down and we ask them out loud, and the accountant answers them, and everybody leaves with the same understanding. That is a management meeting with a professional adviser in it, and it is entirely within the line.
We are not attorneys. What we do is notice, early and out loud, that a question has become a legal one — and in a small business the crossing is usually invisible from the inside. A conversation about how to structure a role becomes a conversation about classification. A conversation about a difficult supplier becomes a conversation about the contract. A conversation about a person who is not working out becomes something with real consequences attached to how it is handled.
At that point we say so, we say what kind of attorney it is (and for anything to do with staff, that it should be one who does employment law specifically, which we do not), and we write it in the weekly note so the boundary is on the record rather than in somebody's memory. Then we carry on with the management side and do not touch the rest.
We are not attorneys. We are not attorneys and nothing on this website or in an engagement is legal advice. Contracts, entity structure, employment law and anything with a dispute in it belong to a lawyer, and part of our job is noticing early that a question has become one of those.
We do not put a value on the business. Owners planning to leave ask for one constantly, and it is the easiest thing on this list to slide into: everybody in this trade has a rule of thumb and most of them will share it after a drink. A number that says what a business is worth is a professional opinion with a licence behind it and consequences attached to it, and a rule of thumb offered helpfully is that opinion in a costume.
No investment advice and no valuations. We do not give investment advice, we do not put a value on a business and we have nothing to do with securities. Work that makes a business more valuable is not the same thing as an opinion of what it is worth, and we do the first.
$2,200 a partner day · ninety minutes free · about one in four we talk out of it
The assessment takes about four minutes and gives you a written summary of what your answers suggest and which engagement addresses each thing. It is indicative and not professional advice, and it is a better opening than a blank contact form. If you would rather skip it, the telephone works and the first meeting is ninety minutes and free.