For owners whose business can’t run without them

The systems are usually sound.They fail in the same place every time.

Profitable on paper and broke in the bank is a symptom, not a cause. Your business rests on five foundations. One of them is load-bearing and has stopped holding — and it is rarely the one you are looking at.

Apply for a Healthcheck See the Five Foundations

26 years

Reading the numbers

Finance, government and business — including years in broking and small-business finance, assessing the real financial position of hundreds of owner-run businesses.

What that buys you →

25 questions

The Check

Three minutes, no sign-up. It names your weakest foundation, what it is likely costing, and one thing to do about it this week.

Take the Check →

45 minutes

The Healthcheck

Free. Bring your last set of figures and an honest description of your week. You leave with something you can use whether or not we ever work together.

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How I look at it

Five foundations. Two halves each.

Most operating frameworks hand you a set of systems. The systems are usually sound. They fail in the same place every time — the owner will not move as fast as the system requires. The procedures don’t get written. The second-in-command doesn’t get authority. The prices don’t go up.

So every foundation here has two halves. One is measurable — what good looks like, pass or fail. The other is what has to shift in you for that standard to hold. The second half is where most of the work is, and it is the part nobody else is doing.

01

The Why

Direction, values, standards and the tone of the place — what is expected here and what gets tolerated.

The harder half: the standard in any business is the worst behaviour the owner walks past.

02

The Spine

Systems instead of fixes, anything repeated written down, and every major lever measured.

The harder half: writing down what’s in your head makes you replaceable, and part of you doesn’t want that.

03

The Execution

Four separate abilities — prioritise, start, maintain, finish. Most owners are strong at some and absent at others.

The harder half: busyness is comfortable. It looks like progress and it postpones harder questions.

04

The Team

Each person read individually and led at their own level, not all led the same way.

The harder half: rescuing feels like leadership. It functions as control.

05

The Profit

Thirteen-week cash visibility, margin by service line, tax genuinely separated.

The harder half: you don’t avoid the numbers because you’re not a numbers person. You avoid them because of what they might say about you.

The weakest one gets fixed first. Diagnosis runs from the top down — I start at The Why and work to The Profit, because a cash problem that began as a standards problem will come back. Delivery runs the other way: cash first, because it buys the room to do everything else. The five foundations in full →

Jay Singh Ahluwalia, Founder and Principal Advisor
Jay Singh Ahluwalia · Founder

What I do

I don’t do tax. I do what happens after the report.

Two halves that most advisors keep separate — the numbers, and the person who has to act on them. Numbers alone have never changed a business; I have watched owners receive a perfectly accurate report and carry on exactly as before. What changes it is you.

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The numbers

Where the cash is really going. Invoicing, claims and payment cycles. Tax set-asides and buffer accounts. Margin by service line. Debtor days.

The owner

How you lead. What you are willing to hand over. Whether your team can decide anything without you — and whether you can tolerate eighty per cent while they learn.

What your accountant handles

Tax, compliance, structure and lodgement — and they should. That is their craft, and I don’t do it. If you don’t have one, get one before you talk to me.

Twenty-six years of reading them

Finance, government and business, including broking and small-business finance. Serviceability assessment teaches you to see a business as it is, not as it presents.

Where it shows up first

The Profit is where it surfaces. It is rarely where it starts.

Almost every owner arrives at the fifth foundation, because that is the one with a due date on it. Your accountant is right. So is your bank balance. They are answering two different questions — one measures what the business earned, the other measures what actually arrived — and the distance between them is what you noticed. What caused it usually sits further up.

The money is trapped, not missing. · The Profit

Sitting in claims not yet submitted, or submitted and unpaid. In work delivered and not invoiced. In wages that went out before the revenue came in.

The tax was never separated. · The Spine

One or two accounts, everything in and everything out. The tax quietly funded operations all year, and nobody decided that — it just happened. That is a systems failure showing up as a cash failure.

The owner is the bottleneck. · The Team

Not because the team is weak, but because no one else has been trained, trusted, or made accountable for the decision.

Nobody is watching the right number. · The Execution

The bank balance is a lagging indicator. By the time it tells you something, it is already true.

What the business earned, and what reached the bank

What the business earnedThe number your accountant reports
What reached the bankThe number you run on

The difference is work delivered and not yet invoiced, invoiced and not yet paid, tax that was never set aside, and wages that went out ahead of the revenue. Illustrative, and deliberately without figures — the proportions differ in every business and I am not going to invent yours. Working out the real ones takes about forty-five minutes and is the first thing the Healthcheck does. Both numbers are real. Only one of them pays wages.

Before you commit to anything

Three minutes will tell you which one is costing you.

Twenty-five questions across the five foundations — five each. No sign-up, nothing shared with anyone else, and no mailing list. It names your weakest foundation, what it is likely costing, and one thing to do about it this week. If you score above thirteen, you probably don’t need me.

Take the Check What it costs

How it works

Start small. It’s the right way in.

Why the prices are on the page. Because you’d ask, and because finding out on a call after forty-five minutes wastes your time more than mine. If the numbers don’t work for your business, that is useful information now rather than later — and it’s a straightforward reason not to fill in the form.

01 — No cost

The Healthcheck

Free · 45 minutes

Bring your last set of figures and an honest description of your week. I’ll show you where the cash is sitting, what your time is costing, and the one structural leak I’d fix first. Not a sales presentation, and not forty-five minutes of me asking what your goals are.

Apply →

02 — $2,500

The Diagnostic

Credited in full within 60 days

A proper examination across the Five Foundations, with a written report and a prioritised sequence. Most owners find the sequence more valuable than the findings. Knowing what is wrong is common. Knowing what to fix first is not.

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03 — from $4,500

The Engagement

Six weeks $6,000 · Twelve weeks $10,000 · The Year $2,500/mo

Rebuild the structure and the way you lead inside it. Cash and margin first, because that buys room to breathe. Then delegation, decision rights, and the team. Founding rates of $4,500 and $7,500 are an exchange, not a discount.

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All figures ex-GST. The founding rate is available in return for a full baseline, a filmed review at the end, and permission to use your results as a case study. When I have the case studies I need, it goes. And if it isn’t working, you aren’t stuck with it — by the end of the six weeks we’ll both know, and if it isn’t holding we stop there. No twelve-month trap.

Twelve months from now

The first step costs nothing.

In about ten months another financial year will close, and you’ll be looking at another set of figures. They’ll either tell the same story as this year’s, or a different one. The changes that matter take a few months to show up in the numbers, which is why the timing of starting matters more than most owners expect.

Six questions. I read every one myself and reply within three working days. If it’s a fit, I’ll send you a time and tell you what to bring. If it isn’t, I’ll tell you that too, and what I’d work on instead.

Apply for a Healthcheck Score your foundations first

“Jay is exceptionally knowledgeable when it comes to business, with a wealth of experience that he draws on and shares. He asks the questions that really allow me to focus on the specifics, the actionable steps and the pathway forward. His explanations are rich in context and allow me to see where my gaps are, so we can then work together to fill in the blanks.”

Hannah Lyn Walker — Founder, Aim In Mind

A note on results. Somerset Business Advisory is a new practice built on 26 years of prior work, and I’m not going to show you other people’s numbers I haven’t earned yet. What I can show you is how I think — book the Healthcheck and judge the work directly.

Apply for a Healthcheck

Six questions. I read every one myself.

I reply within three working days. If it’s a fit, I’ll send you a time and tell you what to bring. If it isn’t, I’ll tell you that too, and what I’d work on instead.

I take a small number of these each month. Nothing is shared with anyone else, and I don’t add you to a mailing list.

Not contractors. People you pay wages to.

Nothing is shared with anyone else, and I don’t add you to a mailing list.

Thank you — that’s with me.

I read every application myself and reply within three working days, either way.

That didn’t send.

Something went wrong at my end rather than yours. Email me directly at jay@somersetbusinessadvisory.com.au and I’ll pick it up.