Financial consulting firm fights for small businesses—with C&F Bank in their corner.

 
Small changes in a small business’s financial foundation can lead to big wins and growth. But how to know what needs to be changed—and how to change it? That’s the stuff that keeps entrepreneurs up at night. They know there’s a problem, but they don’t know what’s causing it, or how to fix it. Maybe there’s a disconnect between cash and profitability. Or they’re struggling to tell their financial story to investors, board members, or a potential acquirer.
 
Find the underlying issue
Business problems come in all shapes — operational bottlenecks, cash crunches, stalled growth, murky profitability. But you can't solve what you can't see, says Kyle Benusa, CEO and cofounder of Ballast Consulting Group in Richmond, Virginia.

To identify the root cause, you need a solid financial foundation. To design a solution, you need to understand how the business actually works. And to implement that solution, you need the infrastructure to track whether it's working. That's what Kyle and his team build for small businesses — finance and accounting as the foundation that makes everything else possible.
That means sitting down with each client, listening to their story, and gathering information. From there, his team synthesizes and organizes that information into a financial model that reveals the underlying issues — and provides the scaffolding to fix them.
 
Know your allies
“We have small businesses fighting massively large corporate entities, and our job is to help the little guys in this fight,” says Kyle. “That's why we do what we do. When we go to work every single day, we're fighting the fight against the big guys on behalf of our clients.”
 
Another ally for the small business? The community bank.
 
While growing his own company, Kyle learned the importance of building a relationship with a banker, a person who understands his business, wants to support him, and is there for him anytime he needs. He found that partnership with C&F Bank.
 
Get ahead of the problem
“Things don't always go as planned,” Kyle says. “Due to macro issues, business cycles, or specific situations with clients, the financials don't always lay out the way you expect. In those moments, you’ve got to get ahead of it, and the way you get ahead of it is by picking up the phone and calling your bank. For us, that’s C&F Bank.”
 
Not all banks are created equal. When Kyle was getting Ballast off the ground and needed a line of credit, a big bank wasn't interested. He was too small an account to matter to them. Community banks, he's found, are built differently. They've made it part of their culture and ethos to focus on smaller businesses.
 
“Getting a banker to pick up a phone when you're calling them and just looking for a $100,000 line of credit is generally hard. It’s not difficult with C&F,” he said. “Small businesses do not survive without local community banks.”
 
Focus on solutions
After a deep dive into a client’s financials, Kyle may find a business needs working capital to fix an underlying issue and get ahead. Capital alone doesn't solve all problems, but there are situations where just the right amount of funding at the right time is exactly the solution. That’s when he helps clients develop their own banking relationship and build the narrative needed to successfully secure financing.
 
When the right banking relationship is in place, the banker functions as an ambassador for the business, understanding its story and carrying that story through the underwriting process. Kyle has seen what that looks like at its best through his relationship with Matt Ohlschlager, who has been with C&F Bank for nearly 18 years.
 
“The bigger an individual business becomes with a bank, the more elevated their issues and problems become,” he says. “So it becomes even more important to have that ambassador at that community bank who’s carrying the torch and telling the story and understanding what's going on.”
 
The idea of a steady, reliable partner on a long journey isn't just how Kyle thinks about C&F Bank. It's the founding principle of Ballast itself. The company is named for the ballast stones loaded into the hulls of 17th- and 18th-century merchant ships. Before setting out on months-long voyages, sailors filled the holds with heavy stones to give the ships stability at sea. When they reached their destination, the stones were tossed overboard—their job done.
 
“We wanted to be that for companies," Kyle says. "This unseen thing that helps provide stability on really long journeys.”
 
Kyle and his team at Ballast Consulting Group measure their success not by growth for its own sake, but by the number of small businesses they're helping. The bigger they get, the more entrepreneurs they can fight for.
 
"When we're solving and fixing the problems within the business, you can see the weight lifted off their shoulders," says Kyle. "You can see what the win feels like. It fires us up. It's awesome."