Our Process

Discovery  | Getting to know your business and your vision.

I want to get to know you and your team, your proudest moments and failures, what is driving you to succeed and what your specific goals are for your future.  In advance of our meeting, you will receive 

 send you Of course, we’ll also discuss the project at hand, an approximate timeline to get us to completion, and what your sales goals are.  During our first meeting, we will also review the initial checklist of items we need vs. what you already have, this way we can begin prioritizing our action items.   

This initial phase helps us efficiently evaluate how your current financial system works and where there might be room for improvement.  To kick us off, we ask you to provide essential financial reports, answer 15 questions in 15 minutes and spend a few hours with us so we can learn about your business.  From there, we work our magic to answer the top 3 questions you have like: 

• My organization is a mess.  What’s the best way to clean up?
• What is my breakeven point? 
• I want my numbers to impress an investor – how?  
• At what point can I hire a new employee as I grow my sales?
• What are the real impacts of my business’s seasonality on cash flow?
• Can I afford a $100,000 loan?

What you get:  At the end of this phase, you receive a dashboard report with financial metrics that are uniquely applied to your business and 5-10 recommendations to improve your financial system for greater control and clarity.  We even take an opportunity to understand where you’ve been spending and saving money and flesh out high level projections to see if you’re on target or not for the year ahead. The best part of this process? Having a birds eye view of your business through the eyes of a “financial person” will pique your interest, engage your thinking and encourage you to think hard about improvements and opportunities.  

About:  The discovery process is for businesses that feel it is time to give their financial system a facelift.  Perhaps you’ve had a few bookkeepers over the years and never managed to oversee their work. Or perhaps you’ve been trying to get financing from lenders or investors only to get a “no” each and every time because your financials are not telling a good story. Or, perhaps you’ve been doing your books this whole time and were never fully confident about your data inputs.  

While Quickbooks has wonderfully democratized bookkeeping, the fact remains that your data must be properly entered according to the rules of accounting in order to convey an accurate story.  Through this Discovery Process, Skopos takes a deep dive into your business’s financial system to understand what the story is that your numbers are telling. We then want to understand how you make money, who your customers are, what your tax returns look like and to see if your numbers jive with your story and industry best practices. 

Whether you’re looking for financing or just want clarity into your numbers, this is a critical planning phase that positions your financial system for success.  

Visuals: Your Income Statement keeps growing.  What started out as an organized “one-pager” is now bloated into 4 pages with account names that are repetitive, out-of-date and .  How can that be? It happens. With the democratization of bookkeeping software, 

Get Organized  | Streamline your processes and make your financials POP (in a great way).

Too often, we see financials that are generic, while your business is anything but!  At Skopos, we want your financials to tell a story of what makes your business unique and awesome.  Based on the recommendations outlined during our Discovery, this next phase is all about elevating your financial system.  This requires new data organization and process improvements that, over time, 

What you get:  Process improvements that save time and give you peace of mind; Clean, financials that you can access with a click (or two) of a button in Quickbooks; Chart of Accounts Manual that define how your books are organized.  Paperless bookkeeping; whenever you have a question, we’re there to help. 

About:  This is where the real work happens. Imagine a financial system where you’re proactively on top of your processes rather than reactively trying to pick up the pieces.  To get to this point is not easy, but we employ the Japanese business philosophy of “Kaizen,” or constant improvement, as our mantra along the way.  

Because change is not always easy, we take this implementation phase in baby steps. This process often requires a whole new way of thinking over at least 6 months.  It is meant for those that are in business for the long haul, want to take control of their financial destiny and make major improvements to their current way of doing business. Persistence and patience are key ingredients over this journey laced with things like expense reporting, integrated apps, customer segmentation and accurate data entry.

Dashboard  | Measuring what matters most.

If we’re doing some clean up to make your financials pop (see #2), then you’ll start to understand the importance of financial metrics as we work together. For example, one of the most important financial metrics for any product-based business is your gross margin.  Over time, we pore over your numbers and explore ideas for growth and how to measure that growth. With each monthly or quarterly dashboard review, new insights are revealed and confidence grows about your business trajectory. 

What you get:  Customized dashboard that highlights the trends in your business and how you’re tracking against your goals. 

Strategize  | Expansion planning and growth coaching for success!

During our monthly reviews, new insights reveal themselves and encourage strategic conversations.  The management team starts to cultivate ideas around customer value, cost savings, business development, customer segmentation and strategic partnerships.  We capture all these ideas into one practical document: the Growth Plan. Whether it’s a 30-day sprint to get as many new customers as possible, or planning a major physical expansion, Skopos’ helps to push your team towards action with the team’s buy-in.

Project Costs:  Project costs drive the need for funding, dictate loan terms and often take the longest to organize to a tee.   We’ll take some time to begin drafting initial project costs and review what supporting documentation is needed. 

Once the discovery phase is underway and we have had a chance to review your business’s financials with a fine-toothed comb, we’ll meet to begin drafting business projections that will estimate the business’s future performance and underlying assumptions.  The projections may include supporting schedules, such as payroll and marketing, to explain more detailed expense items. 

What you get:  Your Growth Plan outlines your objectives and the key results you seek to achieve in one document.  

Money  | Get the attention of investors and lenders.

Lenders and investors don’t give “second chances.”  Getting your funding request right the first time is imperative to fundraising success, and business plan software doesn’t achieve this important goal.   Because we get to know your business and what makes it unique, we go deep in developing business plans and investor decks that articulate a viable formula for success that pique the interest of investors and lenders.

What you get:  Loan package and, ultimately, the money you need to realize your growth plan.

About:  Every year, hundreds of New York City small businesses apply for financing and are declined.  Hundreds more get unsustainable debt from Cash Advance Lenders (like OnDeck and Kabbage) thinking it will help solve their problems only to realize they might be digging a deeper hole. Skopos has worked with dozens of New York City businesses to successfully get the money they need to grow.