We Have a New Look!
If you haven't noticed yet, The McLinden Group has updated our branding and transformed a bit of our message to better reach our clients. Today, we want to introduce TMG Consulting, a company built to provide you with the helpful, modern services you need to reach your business goals. Our rebranding is an effort to better communicate our fast, friendly, and customer-driven mission. It's who we are.
Why Rebranding Matters
Our company's high-quality services and goal to exceed the standards our clients set aren't changing. What has changed is our look. We've polished our brand a bit to stay with the times. We want to create a better future for our clients, and a big component of that comes from our ability to reach you with the right message, services, and experiences.
Our Services Remain Next Level
TMG Consulting continues to offer the financial services, human resource support, and business mentoring our clients have counted on us to offer for so long. We're still providing the stellar fractional finance and accounting services that have defined our business. We've also taken a new step in offering fractional HR services. This is a new, more modern approach to providing you with the services you need. By incorporating fractional HR services into our business model, we feel we are helping our clients reach a new level of support for their employee's needs. We're excited to offer this service to you!
TMG Consulting offers services tailored to meet your individual needs. That includes both virtual and on-site solutions for our client needs. All you have to do is to communicate with us what your needs or frustrations are. We'll then work with you to create a plan of action. With our refreshed lineup of services and customer-driven goals, we are here to help you gain the peace of mind you need when running your business. How can we make things a bit easier for you?
Growing a Business Built on Our Clients' Success
Our goal remains the same. We handle the hard work, the heavy lifting, while you get to step back into your business doing what you love the most – managing your business, meeting your customer expectations, and growing your company. By providing for all the backend work, we free up our clients' time to allow you to better reach your goals. Turn to TMG Consulting for any needs you have. Let's talk about the opportunities available to you.
Top Outsourcing Advantages
Outsourcing has many advantages that include the ability to allow permanent staff to focus on core tasks, cost efficiencies, to help enable growth, and the ability to maintain operational control. Outsourcing also provides flexible staff, improves risk mitigation, and supports the opportunity to develop internal staff through training.
Here are some examples of how to benefit from the advantages of outsourcing.
Focus on Core Tasks
One dynamic responsible for creating thriving companies is having the best employees work on the most effective core tasks that support the company. The outsourcing of mundane, repetitive tasks allows internal staff to spend more of their time and efforts on core tasks that are more beneficial for the company. An example of this might be having the accounting department spend time analyzing data to increase revenues, rather than making the mundane calculations of employee payroll, which is easily outsourced.
Cost Efficiencies
Business owners benefit by better allocation of the time of valuable workers. An example of this is not wasting the time of a highly-paid CFO to do accounting work that is easily done by an outsourced clerk making minimum wage.
Enable Growth
If a company is growing rapidly, then there may not be enough time for the human resources department to recruit and hire enough workers for the expansion requirements. Outsourcing work in such a circumstance supports rapid growth.
Maintain Operational Control
Sometimes a company does not have sufficient staff and/or expertise for a particular area. Outsourcing is a terrific solution for such problems since the needed expertise can be immediately engaged for the benefit of the company. An example of this might be using a cloud-based software solution rather than trying to create the same function in-house.
Flexible Staff
One of the main benefits of outsourcing is the ability to rapidly scale up or scale back depending on a company’s needs. It is usually much easier to adjust staffing levels with the use of outsourced resources.
Risk Mitigation
Relying on outsourcing to provide a backup for critical-path functions in case of an emergency is a good way to reduce risk. An example of this strategy is having more than one data center in different geographical locations, in case one location suffers a natural disaster. Outsourcing, with redundancy, allows another location to pick up the slack in real-time for partial network failure and the company continues to operate unimpeded when experiencing an emergency.
Opportunity to Develop Internal Staff
Another beneficial technique is using outsourced workers, who have special skills, to bring them into an existing operation to have them train internal staff. This strategy has the goal to transfer the skills to the company's internal employees.
Outsourcing has proven to be very effective for businesses in almost all industry sectors. To learn more about the benefits of outsourcing, read Top Outsourcing Advantages.
Regaining Robustness in Quickbooks
Your QuickBooks software has undergone a mountain of changes over the years. Most recently, you gained the ability to leverage multi-monitor view mode and easily track the history of an invoice with the click of a button. In 2019, you even gained a new and improved Condense Data utility that allowed you to customize how much you condensed. Has the way you want to access your QuickBooks data changed?
For most companies, the answer is yes. As technology changes and we adapt to the environmental changes of business, how and when we need access to our information is also changing. QuickBooks has a less robust nephew called QuickBooks Online (QBO). For some businesses, that software meets their less complex accounting needs. For many though, they truly need the robustness of the desktop version of the software but also need the mobility QBO offers.
That is where hosting comes into the picture. QuickBooks hosting is a service that provides you and your accountant with anytime, anywhere, any device, multi-user access to QuickBooks Pro, Premier, or Enterprise. Unlike QBO, with our QuickBooks hosting, you retain all of the robustness of QuickBooks, gain the anytime access, eliminate the need to send files back and forth, and gain the peace of mind that your data is being backed up every 30 minutes and redundantly every evening. Most importantly, you don’t have to be an IT expert and set up your own complex infrastructure to start taking advantage of those benefits. We worry about the details so you can do what you do best, run your business.
If you’ve already moved to QBO and are finding that you are missing a few features that you could regain by moving back to desktop, we’re happy to help. Our Obsessive Support® includes a White Glove Conversion service, free of charge. Our 100% US-based support team is comprised of certified QuickBooks Pro Advisors who understand your accounting software and how to troubleshoot common issues.
A Quick Recap
No Learning Curve – You’re already expert QuickBooks users, we just help you move it to the cloud.
Full Featured Software– You don’t have to compromise features to gain mobility
True Anytime, Anywhere, Any Device access – With full MAC and Mobile support, you are free to take your business with you anywhere.
Disaster Recover - With Swizznet there is no data loss and no conversion necessary. Swizznet has an elaborate and secure backup system that is fully redundantand is monitored 24/7.
Superior Support and Service & No Surprise Costs - Calls to QuickBooks Online can mean hours of frustration. At Swizznet, we work tirelessly to provide you with the best services and support in the industry.
Interested in learning more? We would be happy to help.
How to Create a Business Forecast
If you’re a business owner, making sure you know what you have and what’s anticipated is key. The question is, “How do you get there?” One of the best ways to determine business growth is by conducting a business forecast. A business forecast assists in helping small business owners make decisions based on future trends while lending insight into additional ways to grow the business.
How is this done?
Data from present day activity is used to estimate what may happen in the future. A business forecast is usually needed by lenders who are considering loans and other credit-based opportunities. Short-term forecasts are 12 months or less, while long-term forecasts are usually between three and five years. Both should be monitored on a continuous basis to determine whether the goals are on track.
Getting started
In order to get started, past and present sales and financial data is needed to establish a viable baseline. There are distinct differences between short – and long-term forecasts. Short-term forecasts usually deal with items in the current budget, sales and day-to-day business operations, while long-term forecasts involve the entire business plan, mission and vision statements. The goal is to ensure all elements are aligned. Long-term forecasting also involves assessing the economic climate and future consumer behavior. A good rule of thumb is to have different scenarios with assorted variables to make tangible forecast assumptions.
It’s important to know where your sales will come from throughout the forecast period. Short-term, every item in the budget must be considered, including how certain objectives will be financed if needed, where those sources of income will come from, and the costs of obtaining that funding.
While business forecasts may seem tedious, they are necessary to know where your business is headed and can help prepare you for where you want the business to go. Keeping good records will ensure you have everything you need on hand to start forecasting your short- and long-term business goals.
Astute business owners know and understand the importance of projecting goals for the business. Learning and understanding this concept will put the business in a better position to grow without any major surprises. Planning and perspective can provide a clearer picture. It’s time to look at yesterday, today and tomorrow to put benchmarks in place to properly sustain your business.
Outsource Your Weaknesses - Focus on Your Business Strengths
As a business owner, one of the most difficult challenges to overcome is the realization that you can't do it all 100 percent of the time. No one knows your business, customers, or goals better than you do, but when you hire people you trust to support your efforts, you get impressive results.
Outsourcing Gives You More Opportunity and Power to Grow
Trying to do it all will cost you money. It will also limit the growth of your company in the long term. That’s why outsourcing at least some of those tasks can be bottom-line beneficial to your business. Where do you start?
Focus on outsourcing your weaknesses. Put your best attention into those areas of your business that you are most skilled and passionate about. Then, let someone else handle the tasks that are too hard, too time-consuming, or just not your best skill. When you do this, you’ll find your business has an opportunity to have two people with specializations working towards the same goal – instead of one person trying to do it all.
There are other steps entrepreneurs can take to see lasting improvement. For example, you’ll want to pinpoint areas of concern for your business – such as tasks that are just taking up way too much of your time – and then find a pro to handle them for you. Often, we can help our clients with human resource management, a time-consuming but very important component of your business. With our Fractional HR (as well as Fractional CFO) services, we can alleviate many of those tasks, giving you the results you need without the time constraints.
The fact is, you can keep doing what you are doing right now and potentially see improvements in your business over the long haul. Or, you can begin to focus on the important and valuable tasks in your business that you thrive at and allow someone else to spend time on the others. That’s not to say those tasks are less important.
Set a budget for outsourcing. Then, start talking to the right people to find out more about the opportunities available to you here. You may find that you have far more time and a better quality of life when you let someone else handle some of the extra work at making your business more successful.