The Bonadio Group has opened a strategic advisory practice to help its business clients manage through the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Bonadio Strategic Advisory practice, launched last month, is helping clients deal with streamlining operations, reducing unnecessary expenditures and improving their profitability and cash flow. The Pittsford, New York-based Top 100 Firm is also helping clients cope with supply chain disruptions, customer profitability and vendor cost savings to help them mitigate the financial damage of the pandemic.
“What happened when the pandemic started to hit in early March is we recognized that a lot more of our clients were reaching out and asking for help,” said Bonadio Strategic Advisory division leader Tim Ball. “We really needed a more centralized team at Bonadio to be able to handle some of these requests and needs of our clients and to advise them more comprehensively across the firm. We put together this team of industry leaders and folks within our firm, partners and principals and managers that were pretty experienced with consulting, working and troubleshooting with our clients. We really focused on some of the core services that we thought would be extremely advantageous to our clients during the pandemic, and then of course beyond.”
Some of those services include strategic forecasting and business planning. “The pandemic is sort of a nebulous thing that’s going on,” said Ball. “We’re not really sure of the impact it’s going to have on their businesses. So when we talk about business planning for the next six to nine to 18 months, what does that really mean if the pandemic could potentially be closing down the economy and their ability to do business? We’re helping with liquidity analysis, like how long will my cash actually last if this is the new norm. When we talk about cash flow management, if we understand that this is the new norm, what’s my best way to manage cash, what are some expenses that I can hold out on, expenses that I can get rid of, allowing my cash to work hard for things that are more relevant for my business now, and then how to forecast past the pandemic, past the current crisis and say how are we going to recover and how long that might take if we have a slowdown.”
Cost containment and management are also important for clients, such as analyzing the efficiency of their operations to see ways for them to save money. “For a construction company, we’re looking at some of the expenditures that when business is good and there are a lot of projects going on, those expenditures may not be as big of a deal, but now that we’ve got to tighten the belt, some of those things we might be able to put on hold,” said Ball. “Same thing with a local government looking at potentially a drop in sales tax revenue in the third and fourth quarter of 2020, ways in which they can potentially cut costs and look at their budget for 2021 to manage that dip in revenue. And then doing some operational and efficiency studies. That’s one of the things we’ve been asked to do the most.”
Bonadio has created a free business assessment tool to help its clients determine what to do. “We ask them if they would like to meet with some additional business professionals within our firm, along with their own audit or tax or their normal partner,” said Ball. “We do an assessment where we talk about our capabilities, the impact of COVID on their business, how they handled when everyone had to work from home for a little while, what internal controls looked like, what cost management looked like, and what their finance department looked like, and then other things that might have been troubling to them, like any disruption in the supply chain.”
Taxes are also a concern for many business clients who are uncertain what changes might happen with the incoming Biden administration. “As part of our tax department with our firm, we’re always trying to deal with those new and up-and-coming issues,” said Ball. “Our folks are continually getting educated to help our clients understand what’s coming down the line, especially with the election results and additional economic pressure because of the pandemic, and it’s continuing. We’re having a lot of productive conversations now with our clients and helping them ramp up for what we consider year-end tax planning work and then actual tax work in the spring.”
The firm has been staying in touch with clients through all the tumultuous changes this past year. “It’s just a concentrated effort of making sure we’re out in front and talking with our clients about these services and we’re being as helpful as we can,” said Ball. “It’s no different from what we’ve always done in the past, but it’s a more concentrated effort on assisting them.”