The lead founder Simon has spent his working years split between accounting practice and heading up internal finance teams. Routinely putting his mind to the marginal profit increases he had a good long look in the mirror one day... Then at the rest of his team and even the back office surrounding him and realised to really squeeze every bit of marginal profit from a business you need to be able to adapt and adjust your support staff inline with business needs. As with most problems there was no immediate answer but he set to work - How hard can this be? 

The problem was everyone was good at what they did and was needed but not all the time, maybe the role wasn't broad enough, maybe the individuals skillset wasn't. There was scope to reduce overall workforce and train up current staff in additional skills but this is costly and the business would leave itself more exposed with less people with more individual responsibility, should one of them leave. And what happens if you grow once you've reduced headcount? The thing about volume is there are various technological solutions to this but eventually you will need to hire additional staff which takes time. In larger businesses there's a higher chance of splitting resources over different areas of the business and therefore sharing the cost out, this is when you usually hear about 'shared service centres' or 'head office' which works remarkably well but you need the scale to benefit. Larger businesses can also carry a bit of slack whilst having minial affect on profit margins, this is not the case with small to medium businesses.

Solution - Find someone elses team an ask to share them! But what if they need them when I need them... Ok find a specific company that specialises in flexibility of staffing - Outsourced2.

We're not blind enough to realise this scaling up and down problem would be a problem for Outsourced2, especially if we take on some bigger clients in a short space of time, but here's the thing - Our business is specifically set up to service accounting and finances, it's the primary business so you better believe we've got all the expansion plans ready to go should that purple patch occur and customer service is what the business relies on so the stakes are incredibly high. Due to the agency relationship Outsourced2 has with multiple clients it also has more flexibility to move resource around and one busy will most likely not be a busy period for another business. Outsourced2 will also carry an element of slack via pre-qualified partners ready to go but with the promise this would only be temporary to provide seamless continuity.

Anyway, long story I believe it enough to leave my Group Finance Director position in a well balanced investment business to give my all.

I reached out to my old colleagues who successfully run my parents old Accounting Practice to see if they were interested in a more commercial accounting bolt-on to their service and here we are....