You’re not a ‘finance person’ and that’s ok… 

As start-up founders there is a good chance you have a skill-set and background in developing products and services and selling them. This is how you got the idea off the ground and built an initial customer base. Finance isn’t your forte and it absolutely shouldn’t be.

Once you started hiring people, ‘finance people’ didn’t feature in those initial key roles because finance and accounting was just a necessary evil – run the payroll, pay the bills, file some accounts.

So you got by with a statutory year-end accountant and divvying up finance admin tasks and you may have ended up picking up a chunk that you do on the evenings and weekends – you aren’t totally sure it’s right and you are a bit behind on reconciling.

Ahh but as you begin to scale… neglect finance function at your peril!

But now you are scaling, things are getting more serious and complex on the finance side. You are starting to look at raising finance and potential investors/ lenders are asking questions.

They want to see your business plan, detailed management accounts, budgets, forecasts and sensitivity analysis.

They ask you what you gross margin is on a key product or what the MMR figure is if you are a SAAS company? And you don’t have the answers.. painful silence.

They ask you about revenue recognition policies and how scalable your billing system is if you were to achieve ambitious year on year growth. And they want to know how cash flow is managed and what injections of funds you think you need when?

Now you are discovering it is time to take the finance function seriously. And you really wish you had made progress with this one step back to avoid these terribly uncomfortable conversations – like Dragons Den when entrepreneurs stumble over basic finance numbers and can’t articulate how much profit they expect to make.

There is a better way…. and you are not alone with this!

This is where access to a portfolio FD with experience in start-ups comes in invaluable. Working flexibly alongside you, underpinning your venture with solid and scalable finance capabilities so you can grow with ease.

If you bring such a resource on-board early on, when you do sitting down with these potential investors you will be sharing detailed and comprehensive financial projections and insight.

They will be super impressed at how well thought through this is and that you will know exactly what funds you need when and have contingencies in place.

You won’t have the embarrassment of your financial actuals changing because any accounting adjustments to revenue recognition etc. will be pre-empted and sorted upfront.

Once you have a Board to report to, having already designed a reporting structure that can quickly be turned into a board pack/KPI dashboard will be invaluable to having all important conversations, overcome problems and jumping on opportunities to supercharge growth.

Are you ready to take scaling your start-up seriously?

Let’s have a chat about how bringing a flexible Portfolio FD resource in early could be the key to shaping a start-up that’s going places!