We empower our clients with the right tools to improve their decision making

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At Ravit Insights, we are experts in developing highly scalable, dynamic, threeway integrated financial models, so that you can focus on what ’s important – strategic decision making, forward planning and execution.

Who We’ve Worked With

Our Services

Don’t worry if what you are looking for is not listed below. Ultimately, what we do is help businesses make informed decisions. Get in touch with us for a free consultation and we can discuss your needs. 

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Debt Advisory

If you are applying for a commercial loan from the bank, and they are asking for information you’re not familiar with (cash flow or three-way forecasts), chances are that you are finding it difficult to obtain loan approval.

We work with businesses to prepare the financial information often required by banks. This can help smooth the application process and improves the chance of obtaining a commercial loan.

Maximising Business Value

If you’ve considered selling your business, you may be looking to maximise the sale price.

We provide businesses with performance and efficiency insights to help improve the value of the business.

Project Feasibility

If your business is deciding whether to proceed with a project (e.g. commercial developments, new business product lines, expansion into new markets etc.), you may be asking whether it is worth the time, effort and money.

To help make informed choices, we assist businesses with understanding the financial implications of these potential decisions.

Cash Flow Insights

If your business is profitable but you constantly request to overdraw bank accounts, receive calls about overdue payments or pay excessive interest on overdrafts, you may have cash flow issues.

We help to identify and address potential cash flow gaps, so that businesses can reduce the occurrence of such stressful situations.

We take the guesswork out of commercial strategy

Our team is driven by:

Value

At Ravit Insights, we strive to develop assets that add value to your business decision making

Persistence

We don’t stop at a vanilla solution; we aim to identify your business drivers, so our solutions are relevant to your decision making.

Adaptability

We understand the difference in scale and spend between businesses, so we adapt our approach to what is specific to you.

Our Team

Jun Yan

Director

Jun has been active in the finance industry since 2011 which includes various roles within one of the Big 4 Banks in Australia. Jun has worked in providing financing for growth and working capital, as well as process solutions to both private and ASX-listed companies in health, insurance, retail, manufacturing, wholesale, technology, property and construction.

Tony Chau

Director

Tony brings across his extensive skillset as a former engineer and consultant. He has previously advised a client base spanning multiple levels of federal, state and local government with a focus in securing infrastructure project funding.

Tim Emonson

Technical Advisor

With over 20 years of spreadsheet modelling experience, Tim is one of Australia’s foremost financial modellers, both in building financial models and leading financial modelling teams. His experience covers a wide range of industries including energy, utilities, infrastructure, government, defence, retail, wholesale, manufacturing, agriculture, telecommunications and transport.

AJ Pasanovic

Senior Analyst

AJ completed his Bachelor of Economics at the University of La Trobe. Following the completion of his degree, AJ started his career in one of the Big 4 Banks in Australia and held various positions including Residential Lending, Business Credit Analyst & Business Banking Manager roles.
Outside of work, AJ is a motorbike/car enthusiast, avid gamer and loves binge watching horror movies on Netflix/Stan.

Chana Tsai

Analyst

Chana has worked as a franchise business consultant in one of the leading health and wellness companies in Australia. Her experience includes assisting investors in analysing business opportunities. She has also been involved in investigating areas for improvement in businesses through short and long term business planning in areas such human resources, financial planning, sales, operations as well as back and front-end management.

Jonson Lian

Analyst

Jonson graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Master’s degree in Management (Accounting) He was the recipient of the Eric J. Ingram Prize for achieving the highest result in the subject, ‘strategic cost management’. Jonson is passionate about learning real-life business skills and is keen to help make a difference in Australia’s business landscape.

Barbara Chung

Marketing Co-ordinator

Barbara is an architect/designer with a background in commercial, public and private scale projects. At Ravit Insights, she is the designer and co-ordinator for all of the company’s branding and marketing material.

Ravit Insights’ Partners

We strive to deliver high quality decision-making tools and services tailored to the needs of our clients. To achieve this level of quality, we leverage off, and engage key technology and collaboration partners. 

Modano

Key Technology Partner

Provides best in class software that is helping to redefine the process of developing Microsoft Excel-based financial models. Its content management platform helps to foster and grow the community of model developers.

DataDear

Key Technology Partner

Provides best in class software to create two-way connections to Xero and Quickbooks. We use DataDear to help our clients create and automate consolidation three-way models, improve reporting, as well as keep their data “live” with direct connections into their Xero and Quickbooks.

Model Citizn

Key Collaboration Partner

Our collaboration partner on highly complex transactions. They bring decades of experience in financial services, property, technology, social impact, investment trust, and government tenders.

Mission Grow

Key Collaboration Partner

Business advisory partner, supporting entrepreneurs in making inspired, informed and timely decisions.

Everrich Finance

Key Collaboration Partner

Everrich Finance was founded in Melbourne 2017 as a mortgage brokerage firm, specialising in residential, commercial, investment and business lending.

Standard Ledger

Key Collaboration Partner

A collaborative partner who provides the full suite of services to start-ups and SMEs from bookkeeping, accounting all the way to CFO advisory services. Standard Ledger’s goal is to help start-ups stay in business and ultimately to grow over time.

OziDesktop

Key Collaboration Partner

Accounting partner we've worked with providing Taxation, Accounting and Bookkeeping services.

Journal

Jun Yan
In Business Advice

Why growth is bad for your bank balance

Growth is good. But it comes with big challenges.

With the hype in the startup world, growth, in the form of a mythical hockey stick, has become one of the much vaunted and sought after business metrics.

As we frequently see reported globally, the highest growth and highest valued technology startups are rarely profit or cash flow positive – think Uber and WeWork.

What that means for the majority of business owners, is that balancing growth with cash flow or capital needs is one of the key operational challenges.

It’s probably what you’ll lose sleep over (if this is you, take a breath and fill out our growth early warning signs check list ).

Put as a simple equation:

Time + Money = Growth

It’s not always that easy to distill, but the concept means either taking your time to grow organically at a rate matching your business structure, or you’ll need to pay to fast-track that growth. The problem is that many businesses experiencing fast growth don’t have a solid understanding of their model, or potentially that the growth is not always good. We encounter this daily. We met with Founder M who was thrilled with the fast pace of growth of their company but after looking at their bank balance, they had a gut feel something wasn’t quite right.

The metrics looked great and business was booming – the user base was rapidly scaling, while sales and revenue were growing quickly. Then we took a look at the real figures. What we found was that although the company was growing rapidly, for every dollar it made in sales, it was losing 20 cents. That’s not a long-term business model that anyone wants to be in charge of.

A deeper discussion with the Founder M also brought forward the stress they were under and challenges with operational cash flow. We were able to develop a historical financial model of the business which in turn allowed us to forecast the impact of this continued growth. Discovering that the fast-paced growth was actually hurting cash flow with a serious impact on working capital, enabled this founder to make some quick changes that have changed the way the business operates.

In this case it was some simple changes in how invoicing was being managed which gave the business a clear view to prioritise improvement of their processes and systems around invoicing.

Here are some of the common concerns we see every week in high growth companies:

Capacity constraints

Capacity issues are when you start struggling to meet deadlines or fulfil your service agreements.

How to manage this:
Good record keeping is essential to know that your time taken to meet your targets or deadlines is creeping up. It likely will mean that your gross margins are starting to decline. If you know it’s a problem you can identify the solution which could mean raising prices, or hiring staff or a combination of the two.

Cash flow issues

High growth doesn’t always mean cash in the bank. In fact, in most cases it’s the opposite and cash flow issues are one of the most common struggles in all kinds of business. This area in particular is where the term “creative accounting” starts to come into its own where business owners try to find cash flow where they can, and that will inevitably lead to problems.

How to manage this:
Knowing and understanding your business fundamentals and cash flow is essential. One solution is to build a three-way financial model to see the impacts of decisions on your bank balance.

Too busy for admin

If you’re too busy working on the business to run it, you’re about to hit some problems. We commonly see business owners who are in trouble due to missing payroll, not paying superannuation properly or even missing their quarterly tax payments.

How to manage this:
Ensure you have the right support in place to keep your admin responsibilities on track. Depending on the size and scale of your business, this might mean looking at hiring staff, upskilling or an external option such as a virtual CFO or consultant.

Feeling stressed

Often overlooked in business is how you’re feeling. Growth can easily equate to high stress, lost sleep and decline in your overall well-being. But being stressed and busy isn’t always an indicator your business is doing well. As we saw in the case study at the start of this article, understanding how you are servicing the growth is essential to ensure it is meeting your business goals.

How to manage this:
Use stress and busyness as early warning signs to take a break and ensure you are across all your company fundamentals to ensure you’re growing in the right direction. If you’re wondering whether your growth is about to create challenges for you, we’ve created this checklist.

Take a moment to think about how these affect you:

Growth early warning sign checklist

❏    It’s taking you longer to deliver projects or meet deadlines

❏    Your day to day costs are growing (check your accounting software)

❏    You don’t know how much cash is in the bank week to week (cash position)

❏    You’ve started losing track of admin (is your payroll getting done)

❏    You’re unsure if you’re paying all your bills on time

❏    You are on ATO Payment Plan

❏    You’re worried about running out of capital

❏    Losing sleep/feeling stressed

If you’ve checked more than two boxes, and need help, feel free to reach-out to our team for help: info@ravitinsights.com.au

Jun Yan
In Business Advice

Don’t listen to billionaires — they don’t understand your business

When we started Ravit Insights, we followed advice from billionaires and industry experts by putting ourselves in front of potential clients and this is what it got us: radio silence. The truth is, billionaires and experts don’t have a full understanding of our company, and they don’t have a full view of yours either — despite what they would have you believe on LinkedIn and Instagram.

They got to their high level of success over a long period of time, and they’ve probably forgotten half of what they’ve done to get there.

The mistake we made was taking their words at face value rather than thinking for ourselves. Following their advice, we priced our solution too high, and we didn’t go anywhere. Instead, we needed to educate ourselves and find people who truly understood what we were trying to achieve and at what scale and pace.

We could have had a lot more clients if we had ignored the experts and trusted our gut straight away. This is the advice we wished we had been given two years ago.

1. Beware advice without context

Experts love to give their advice, and it can be valuable, but any business owner needs to understand it is often given without context or a full appreciation of the intricacies of your company. Listen to your gut. You have experience and skills that have brought you to where you are — that instinct is everything you’ve learnt in action.

2. Listen to your clients

Pricing is so important for a new business. We believed we needed to prove ourselves first to be competitive in the market, rather than price high straight away. Other businesses might have different needs and struggles. Looking back, we would recommend you do your research and know and understand your competition, but what ultimately worked for us was getting in front of people and listening to them — especially when they weren’t saying anything.  You know what works or not, so by facing a client or a customer, you can get a gut feeling if it’s right or wrong.

3. Educate yourself

When people start a business, they often see an unmet need for which they have found a solution. Others are also driven by passion and an underlying mission. The finances flow on from that, but business owners often don’t have the level of financial literacy to understand fundamentals, such as how their business finances work or what the cashflow is like month-to-month. That’s why it’s important to get help. You don’t need to know how to make a financial model, but you can understand what happens to your finances when you grow and hire staff or if you need to raise funds.

This post was first featured on Smart Company.

We believe that all businesses should be underpinned by robust financial models to assist you with making the best decisions for your business – and our tools can help you do just that.

Address:
Stone & Chalk, Goods Shed North
710 Collins Street
Docklands, VIC
3008

Contact:
info@ravitinsights.com.au or via our contact form to see how we can assist you today.

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Contact us today at info@ravitinsights.com.au