Developing your Finance Team

​Is your office manager, bookkeeper or accountant a little out of their depth? Has the business grown beyond their skills? Are you relying more and more on your expensive external accountants?
 

When was the last time an experienced FD spent time with your finance team to understand their skills and abilities and help them develop?
 

Call it coaching, mentoring or training, the objective is to get more out of your finance team so that they help you achieve your goals.
 

Most business owners recognise capability and want to keep loyal and hardworking staff and resist replacing them with more experienced and qualified staff.
 

And who can blame them? The cost of recruiting new staff is expensive and if you get it wrong, the consequences can be dramatic.
 

There is another way. Good people want to learn more and appreciate the opportunity to do so.
 

The first step is to listen to them. What are their challenges and frustrations?  What improvements would they like to make?
 

People are generally resistant to change and often have experiences of people who don’t understand their jobs trying to ‘tell them’ what to do. So, it’s important to build trust.
 

Next, it’s time to demonstrate how processes can be improved. It really isn’t good enough to simply implement changes that will make them more efficient. They usually have to accept that the improvements will work before they will agree to try them out.
 

Support and encouragement are then key to ensuring they stick with it and put these new processes into action.
 

The knowledge gap between your internal account (costing £25 an hour) and your external accountant (at £250 an hour) isn’t as great as you might think.  There really is so much more your in-house team can do if they are shown how.