Rowan and I came up with our business name, SmartBooks Online over a few beers one evening.
It was a very literal name, and that’s the way we intended it. Most people figured we were an accounting business. Some thought we were optometrists or book publishers.
Either way, over the last three years we’ve built the brand to what is today. And today I’m proud to announce that we’ve outgrown it – in a good way.
We’re now called SBO.
Yeah we know, it’s a small change. And, one worth making.
Why are we rebranding?
A few reasons. It’s easier to type, it isn’t such a mouthful to say… but mainly because over the last 12 months we’ve broadened our offering beyond the scope of bookkeeping into more value-added and technical services. These services have covered financial reporting at both management and board level, budgeting and forecasting, detailed financial modelling, higher level accounting.
We’ve been delivering these services driven by market demand. But we found our existing name didn’t ‘fit’.
A common response by founders unfamiliar with our capability would often say ‘aren’t you just bookkeepers?’.
They would question our ability to deliver based on our brand. So we needed to come up with a new name and a new message.
So if we’re not just doing bookkeeping now, what do we call what we do?
Operational finance. SBO does operational finance and accounting for high-growth businesses.
What is operational finance?
The core stack of financial activities a business needs to achieve its goals.
This stack can be represented as:
We prefer to think of these subscriptions as products and not services.
The reasoning is we are in the business of delivering outcomes, not hours of time.
Having products allows us to provide a definable outcome for each subscription eg. a reconciled set of books, a 12 month budget, a monthly report and check-in with an advisor to go through the numbers.
So what does that mean for me?
Meh, not much.
Just continue to refer to us as SBO!
Yours accounting,
Rowan and Jason and the SBO team.
Oh PS: our new website domain is sbo.financial
