Two Kansas City-area business consultants teamed up to create a free online assessment tool for small businesses designed to identify cost savings.
The tool is called the BOS Financial Assessment, and it was put together by Shane Glavin, president of Power CFO in Kansas City, and Arthur Riley, chief visionary officer for Endgame Consulting Solutions in Lenexa.
BOS stands for Blue Ocean Solutions. It comes from a saying that for a business to grow, it has to get out into the blue ocean — away from murky waters.
The BOS tool looks at six key areas where overpayments and inefficiencies often hide significant dollars, sometimes for years. It comes from Glavin’s 20 years of experience in accounting and finance at big corporations such as Dairy Farmers of America Inc., Bushnell and Procter & Gamble. He wants to bring the same approach to small business.
“The whole goal was to put something together that No. 1 is free, No. 2 follows the KISS (Keep it simple, Stupid) principle and third identify savings opportunities with a solution in place,” Glavin said. “We set ourselves up with strategic partners that specialize in these six key areas, and they're the big boys, and so they're coast-to-coast, large firms. As soon as someone takes this assessment, it automatically emails these strategic partners the results. If there looks to be an opportunity, the strategic partner will reach out to the client. We've already negotiated best-in-class pricing, so they don't even have to worry about getting a good price.”
Glavin said one example of savings the assessment tool often finds comes from the work opportunity tax credit. Most small businesses don’t know they even qualify for the tax credit — and often, neither does their bookkeeper. For example, he said, a small pizza shop with 10 part-time employees who generate more than 120 hours of work, the business could qualify for a $2,400 tax credit that year for each employee. That’s a potential savings of $24,000.
“Small business owners don’t have the same financial resources for strong back-office support, so we created this BOS assessment tool to give them some of that,” Glavin said.
