Simic Financial

A call our M&A team gets a few times a year: "Someone wants to buy the business. What do I say?" An unsolicited approach is flattering, and occasionally it's real. Before anything else, three things. First, say less than feels natural. Thank them, take their details, tell them you'll come back to them. Don't confirm revenue, don't estimate profit, don't hint at a price. Anything said casually becomes the anchor for every conversation that follows. Second, nothing leaves the building without an NDA — and even then, information goes out in stages. A serious buyer expects exactly that. A tyre-kicker, or a competitor fishing for your customer list and margins, tends to lose interest right about there. That's the filter doing its job. Third, and this is where outcomes are decided: one interested buyer isn't a market. If a genuine acquirer sees value in your business, others likely would too, and the difference between negotiating with one buyer and two is usually worth more than any amount of hard bargaining. That doesn't mean running a full sale process. It means knowing what the business is actually worth, on defendable numbers, before you respond to somebody else's opinion of it. Plenty of unsolicited approaches turn into good outcomes. The ones that end badly usually gave away the information, the timetable and the price anchor in the first fortnight. #MergersAndAcquisitions #BusinessSale #ExitPlanning #SMEAdvisory

One industry survey this year found around two-thirds of Australian small businesses have either raised prices already or expect to. If yours isn't among them, your costs didn't get the memo: wages moved again on 1 July, and rent, insurance, software and energy have been climbing since 2022. The maths on a modest rise is worth seeing in full. A $2M services business that lifts prices 4% adds $80,000 of revenue with no extra cost attached — it all lands on the bottom line. If the business was earning $200K, that one decision is a 40% profit lift, with room to lose a client over it and still come out well ahead. What we see in practice: businesses that review pricing every year, move 3–5% at a time and give clients 60–90 days' notice barely lose anyone. Businesses that avoid the conversation for three years end up needing a 15% catch-up, which is a much harder letter to write. When did your prices last move? If the honest answer is more than 18 months ago, that's probably the highest-return hour you'll spend this month. Happy to walk through how we'd approach it for your business — comment below or DM us. #Pricing #Margins #Profitability #SmallBusinessAU #ThinkLikeACFO

Most cash crunches don't ambush a business. They queue up quietly — a big BAS, a slow-paying customer, a rent review — and land together in the same fortnight. A 13-week cashflow is the simplest tool we know for seeing that early. One page: what's coming in and what's going out, week by week, for the next quarter. Updated weekly, it takes under an hour. The value isn't precision — week 13 will be wrong, and that's fine. The value is that a shortfall shows up on paper two or three months before it shows up in the bank, while you still have every option: pull invoicing forward, stage a payment, delay a purchase, have the conversation early. It's the first thing our team builds with almost every new client, whatever they originally came in for. If you'd like the template we use, drop a comment and we'll send it across. #Cashflow #ThinkLikeACFO #VirtualCFO #SmallBusinessAU

Tuesday 28 July is the due date for super guarantee on the April–June quarter. It's also the last time you'll ever pay super that way. Payday Super started on 1 July: super now travels with every pay run, due within 7 business days of payday. But the June quarter still falls under the old rules, so this month your business pays both — the final quarterly catch-up for Q4 FY26, plus the payday super you've already been sending since 1 July. On a $1.6M wage bill that's roughly $48K landing on the 28th, on top of the super already going out with each July pay run. Not a penalty, just two systems overlapping for one month. But if your cash forecast only had one super line in July, it's worth a look today. Two things worth checking this week: that the quarterly payment reaches the fund by the 28th (transfer time counts), and that your July pay runs sent super inside the 7-day window. Our team has been walking clients through the crossover all month — happy to talk it through if you're unsure where you stand. Drop a comment or DM us. #PaydaySuper #Superannuation #SmallBusinessAU #Cashflow #VirtualCFO

Late in a business sale, after the price is agreed, comes a part most owners don't see coming: the warranties and indemnities. It's often where the last real negotiation happens, and it can follow you for years after the deal is done. In plain terms, warranties are a set of promises you make to the buyer about the business — the accounts are accurate, the tax is paid, there's no lawsuit brewing, you own what you say you own. Indemnities are your agreement to cover the buyer for specific, known risks if they turn into a cost. Together they answer the buyer's fair question: if something's wrong that I couldn't see, who wears it? Mostly, the seller does. Why it matters to what you actually keep. If a warranty turns out to be wrong — a tax position that doesn't hold, a customer dispute you didn't disclose — the buyer can claw money back from the price, sometimes years later. That's why part of the proceeds often sits in escrow (held back in trust) for a period, and why sellers increasingly use warranty and indemnity insurance to cap their exposure and take more cash at completion. Where our M&A team spends the time is narrowing what you're promising to what you can genuinely stand behind, and getting the limits and time periods right — because a great headline price with an open-ended warranty behind it isn't the deal it looks like. If you're thinking about selling in the next few years, understanding this early takes a lot of the fear out of it. Send us a message and we'll walk you through how it works. #MergersAndAcquisitions #BusinessExit #DueDiligence #SuccessionPlanning #AustralianBusiness

I'll be honest about something from earlier in my career. For a long time I measured a year by how busy it felt. Full calendar, phone going, always something on — that was my proof it was working. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to learn that busy and profitable are not the same thing, and that you can have a flat-out year that leaves you nowhere. What changed it wasn't working harder. It was starting to actually look — sitting down with the numbers often enough to see where the effort was going and what it was really earning. Some of the busiest work turned out to earn the least. Some of the quiet, unglamorous work was carrying everything. I couldn't see any of that from inside the busyness. I could only see it in the numbers, once I bothered to read them properly. That's really the whole idea behind "think like a CFO", and why our team builds it into how we work with owners. It isn't about being a finance person. It's about giving yourself the clarity to tell the difference between motion and progress — because effort feels the same either way, and only the numbers tell you which one you're actually getting. If you're heading into the back half of the year feeling busy but not certain it's adding up, you're not alone, and it's worth a look. #ThinkLikeACFO #SmallBusinessAU #Profitability #VirtualCFO #Leadership

Company insolvencies in Australia are at record levels — well over a thousand a month, with construction and hospitality hit hardest. It's sobering, and it's easy to read as bad luck or a tough economy. But most business failures aren't sudden. They're slow, and they show up in the numbers long before they show up in the bank. The tells are almost always the same, and every one of them is visible months out if someone's watching. Debtor days stretching, customers who paid at 30 now paying at 55. Gross margin thinning a point or two as costs rise and prices don't. GST and PAYG quietly falling behind because the cash to pay them keeps getting used for something else. Suppliers tightening terms. None of these is fatal on its own. Together and ignored, they're the story of most of those failures. The businesses that come through aren't luckier — they see these signals early and act while it's still a small correction, not a crisis. That's the whole case for reading your numbers monthly instead of yearly: not fear, just enough warning to steer. If you're not sure which few numbers are worth watching as early warning, that's a good conversation to have before you need it — comment or message us and we'll walk through it. This is general information, and if things are already tight, a good accountant or insolvency professional is worth talking to early. Silence is the expensive option. #SmallBusinessAU #Cashflow #Insolvency #VirtualCFO #FinancialClarity

It's easy to think of messy books as a tax-time headache — a scramble in July, then forgotten. The real cost isn't in July. It's every decision you make in the eleven months between. Every time you set a price, take on a hire, sign a lease or chase growth, you're making a bet — and your numbers are the odds. If the data is late or wrong, you're betting blind: hiring into a month that was actually soft, holding a price that stopped covering its costs, spending against cash that isn't really there. Clean, current books aren't about compliance. They're the quality of the information behind every call you make. That's why our team treats bookkeeping as the foundation of the decisions, not the paperwork after them. What's one call you'd make differently if you fully trusted your numbers? Have a think about it. #Bookkeeping #FinancialClarity #SmallBusinessAU #VirtualCFO #DecisionMaking

One of the first questions owners ask when they start thinking about selling is "how long will it take?" The honest answer surprises most of them: from decision to money in the bank, a well-run mid-market sale usually takes somewhere between nine and eighteen months — and that's when it goes well. Where the time goes. A few months getting the business ready before anyone sees it — clean accounts, normalised earnings, the obvious risks tidied. Then finding and qualifying buyers. Then due diligence, which is running deeper and longer than it did a couple of years ago, because buyers are more selective and the new merger-approval rules mean bigger deals face more scrutiny. Then legals and completion. Every stage takes longer than the seller expects and about as long as the buyer plans for. Why knowing this early matters: the value isn't created during the sale, it's created in the year before it. The owner who starts eighteen months out — getting the numbers clean, reducing how much the business leans on them, spreading customer concentration — sells a calmer, more valuable business. The owner who decides on a Monday and wants out in ninety days takes whatever the market gives them. If selling is on your horizon, even a few years off, the best time to start getting ready is well before you're ready to go. We sit down with owners early, long before there's a buyer in the room — message us if that's you. #MergersAndAcquisitions #BusinessExit #SuccessionPlanning #SaleReadiness #AustralianBusiness

There are two company tax rates in Australia — 25% for small "base rate entities" and 30% for everyone else — and a lot of owners assume they're on the lower one when they're not. To get the 25% rate, two things have to be true: turnover under $50M, and no more than 80% of your income being "passive" — meaning interest, most dividends, rent and royalties, rather than money earned from actually trading. Most trading businesses clear this easily. But it catches the ones that have built up investments on the side — a company holding a rental property, or sitting on cash and shares — where the passive income creeps over the line and the whole company's profit gets taxed at 30%, not 25. Five points of tax doesn't sound like much until it's on real profit. On $400,000 of company profit, the difference between 25% and 30% is $20,000 a year — money that either compounds inside the business or goes to the ATO, decided by a test most owners have never checked. As FY26 returns get prepared, it's worth confirming which rate you're actually on and why — and if you're near the passive-income line, whether the structure still fits. This is general information; your accountant can confirm your position. If you're not certain which rate your company is paying, that's a fair question to put to your adviser this month. Happy to point you at what to ask — drop a comment. #CompanyTax #TaxPlanning #SmallBusinessAU #VirtualCFO #BusinessStructure