Stern Cohen clients are at all stages of the business cycle: start up, growth, or in transition due to retirement. Whatever stage you’re at, whatever challenges you’re facing, we’ll tailor our service to your needs, bring in our full service team, and support you when you need us. Our clients sleep well at night knowing they have expert guidance for their business.

Transaction Advisory

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the business landscape. Innovation, consolidations, mergers and acquisitions are the new normal.

As a result, are you buying or selling a business?  Are the shareholders of your business changing?

More than ever you are in need of business projections.  You urgently need to understand your cash flow situation.  You’re looking for data and analysis around your income and financial statements.  At this crucial time you need a strong accounting team and tax specialists on your side to ensure the best outcome.

Stern Cohen’s business advisory services include:

• Management advisory
• Financial modeling (see details below)
• Business financing assistance
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Corporate structuring and restructuring
• Reorganizations
• Divestitures
• Due diligence
• Cash flow projections
• Exit, retirement and succession planning

Business Advisory Needs

As a business owner, are you considering any of the following:

1. Should I open a new plant?
2. How should I price my new product line?
3. How can I manage cash flow when starting a project that will drain my resources?
4. How much can I afford to pay my staff and when should I hire new staff to keep up with business demands?
5. When will I start making a profit on our new facility, and what will my return on investment be?

The answers to these questions and many more are available with our financial modeling service.  Why create a financial model? It will reduce your risk and highlight the successful way forward. Rather than relying on your intuition to answer these questions, business owners can benefit from a quantitative approach to assessing the risks and long-term financial benefits of their decisions. The ideal tool for this is a customized, dynamic financial model leveraging best practices from Bay Street, where deals running into the billions of dollars are decided based on financial model outputs.

Financial Modeling – How it Works

We assist business owners with making business decisions by creating a customized financial model. Financial models are used on Bay Street to assess the feasibility of deals, projects and ventures running into the billions of dollars, and we are proud to bring the same level of quality models to small and medium-sized businesses.

Financial models make use of key financial and operational information about your business. The information is then processed to analyze how your business will react to different economic situations or events, and to forecast the outcome of financial decisions before committing any funds to a specific project. The audience of a financial model is usually twofold: the decision-makers within an organization, and those providing financing (investors and banks). Therefore, business owners can use models not only to make decisions, but also to convince equity and debt owners that their projects are solid investments.

A robust financial model will provide the user with the ability to quickly alter assumptions related to revenues, expenses, etc., and to immediately see their impact on financial metrics such as net profit and company/project value over time, discounted cash flow, payback period, etc. The typical steps involved in the financial model development process are outlined in the infographic below: