If accountants want to be involved in an exciting “new income stream” – now is the time to make sure that your team has been trained and reviews have been undertaken to identify clients who might be interested and that you are ready to roll out a fantastic service.
What I’m talking about is “Crowd Sourced Funding Equity Raising”!
Or you can potentially sit back and watch some of your clients being poached by other accounting or consulting firms that are aware of the tremendous opportunities that are going to be available to the Australian accounting/business consulting industries from the opportunities that Crowd Sourced Funding presents.
ESS BIZTOOLS has been supplying business advisory services products to accountants since 1997.
Each year since then we have released a range of new products to keep accountants abreast of the latest developments in the commercial market which relate to small/medium enterprises.
The latest product is “Crowd Sourced Funding”!
We have spent hundreds of hours in research and developing our material for our subscribers to use the Crowd Sourced Funding Product Package to supply an outstanding commercial service to their clients and prospects.
We are the only supplier to the Australian accounting industry who has developed a Crowd Sourced Funding Product Package to assist accountants to deliver these services.
We would like to invite you to join us on this journey so you can take this opportunity of being able to really serve your clients.
It’s worth considering who these clients are going to be – who seek out crowd sourced funding?
They have to be companies with turnovers under $25 million per annum and gross asset value under $25 million.
They are the traditional clients of average accounting businesses in Australia, not the big four, not the top 20 firms, but the average suburban, city and regional accountancy firms throughout Australia.
These firms are typical of your clients and therefore we believe you have a tremendous opportunity to service them as they aspire to go to the “next level”.
They are not going to be listed public companies (at least at this stage) but they are going to become bigger and hopefully more successful because they have raised the funds to enable them to develop and expand their businesses.
What are the services that we envisage that you will supply to them?
Virtually every company that aspires to be a Crowd Sourced Funding Equity Raising Company will need assistance with:
- Business Plan
- Budgets
- Cashflow Forecasts
- Key Performance Indicators Analysis for the business – how do they perform?
- Benchmark comparisons of the company’s performance against similar companies
- Company Valuation
- Share Price Determination
- Information Memorandum
- Crowd Sourced Funding Offer Document which is the de facto prospectus for the company but you need to have prepared the other documents first if you are going to produce a Crowd Sourced Funding Offer Document.
- Your clients will need to understand what the role of the Intermediary is in this whole process (these are people with Australian Financial Services Licence with a special endorsement for crowd sourced funding)
- Understanding the Intermediary’s role
- Assisting company directors to have discussions with Intermediaries and to appoint an Intermediary
- Corporate governance issues for directors with companies that are growing
I believe that as you are the accountant for the company you have a prominent role in these negotiations for your clients.
So why now?
Why are we getting excited now about Crowd Sourced Funding at this time of the year?
The reason is that Crowd Sourced Funding was legislated to commence from 29th September 2017 and, in the intervening period, ASIC has been finalising the engagement of Intermediaries – in fact they have not appointed any Intermediaries yet but we understand they will be finalising the appointment of the initial batch of Intermediaries by around Christmas or early in the New Year and then Crowd Sourced Funding can start – companies can start talking to Intermediaries – but there’s a lot of preparation work to be done first primarily relating to the items that I’ve mentioned.
Incidentally, I believe that the professional fees to be earned from performing these services will be between $20,000 and $40,000 per client. That’s a lot more than the average accounting fee of $3,865 that Australian accounting firms earned from business clients in 2016.
Enable Funding, which was previously known as Australian Small Scale Offerings Board (ASSOB), which has a track record of having assisted a few hundred companies over the last 10 years to raise around $170 million mainly under Section 708 of the Companies Act, have forecast a “tenfold increase in equity fund raising in Australia”. Enable Funding is forecasting that Australia will follow the trends in the rest of the world and that equity crowd fund raising will increase tenfold over the next 5 years from $119 million (primarily Section 708 capital raising) in 2016 to a staggering $1.5 billion in 2021, which is just 4 years away – $1.5 billion!
Are you going to be part of this great new opportunity to service your clients, but also to create a brand “new income stream” for your accountancy business? An income stream that no other accountancy business in Australia has any more knowledge about then you, other than the ESS BIZTOOLS’ subscribers who have had access to the Crowd Sourced Funding Product Package for the last 3 months.
I invite you to join us on this very exciting journey. We believe we have the track record. We have been around for 20 years supplying these types of products to accountants all over Australia to assist in the delivery of commercial services to the small/medium enterprise market.
Now is your opportunity to get involved in this new market.
ESS BIZTOOLS – Gold Package – incorporates the Crowd Sourced Funding Equity Raising Package, which is available to assist accountants to introduce a range of commercial services to your clients. For more information, please click here.
We also have an alternative in that you could subscribe to the Crowd Sourced Funding Equity Raising Package as a standalone package. For more information, please click here.
To celebrate the launch of Crowd Sourced Funding in Australia we are presenting a special free webinar – “It’s Time for Crowd Sourced Funding” on Thursday, 18th January 2018 at 12-noon (AEST)/1.00pm (AEDT). (Click here) to register to participate in this webinar.
If you have any questions on any aspects of the Crowd Sourced Funding Equity Raising Product Package or the products produced by ESS BIZTOOLS, please do not hesitate to contact us. Telephone – 1800 232 088. Email – peter@essbiztools.com.au.
From the team at ESS BIZTOOLS, we’d like to take this opportunity of wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
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