Catherine Eyers
There is no hiding the fact that it has been a terrible couple of years for business, thanks to the pandemic. Many have gone out of business, but many people, prompted by working from home, furlough and redundancy, have been spurred on to start their own businesses.
Perhaps you did that, or perhaps you are thinking of doing that. You may already have started a small business and are struggling to cope with all of the administration needed. You may have come to the realisation that a large part of your business is involved in dealing with government red tape – accounts, tax returns, VAT, Companies House filings and so on.
The UK has one of the most complex tax systems in the world. Then there is marketing, PR, recruitment, web design and other things that do not represent income, rather overhead, expenditure and time-consuming additional work.
There is a need for decent, low-cost support for start-up and small businesses run by professionals. We would all love to farm out our accounts, legal, marketing, PR, website design, IT support, recruitment and other administrative headaches to professional third parties who charge upwards of £250 per hour.
The reality is that we simply cannot afford that, which is where a support organisation like Carlton DeVere comes in.
Instead of paying different professionals a small fortune in fees, you can now pay one low, fixed monthly fee to a single organisation and have them take on your administration overhead for, typically, less than the cost of a single employee.
“We set up Carlton DeVere specifically to help start-ups and small businesses to grow and flourish, unencumbered by the red tape, bureaucracy and administration overhead that has the potential to sink a business,” says Carlton Devere managing partner Catherine Eyers. “The services provided by Carlton DeVere allow our clients to get on with the business of running their business. The upshot is that business owners have more time to do other things, spend more time with their families, are less stressed and have a higher quality of life.”
How is an organisation like Carlton DeVere able to provide accounting, legal, marketing, PR and web design services for a fraction of the cost of other third-party providers?
“Over the years, we have built state-of-the-art software systems, which allow us to automate much of the administration of start-ups and small businesses, where the complexity of administration is not too demanding,” says Catherine.
“We even developed a software front-end that clients can use which automatically builds sales and purchase figures so that we can carry out credit control for them at a fraction of the frankly ludicrous charges levied by factoring companies.
“Unlike them and recruitment firms, who charge large commissions, we see the work involved in collecting money and recruiting staff on behalf of clients as a task which takes pretty much the same amount of time irrespective of the amounts involved, which is why we can charge low, monthly, fixed fees with no hidden extras at all. We can even do basic legal work like employment contracts, terms of sale and even litigation, again, for a low, fixed monthly fee with no additional charges.
“There is also a real-time portal that clients can log into to see how much money is being collected from their customers, the progress of statutory documents with Companies House, HMRC, the progress of recruitment, legal work, marketing and so on.”