Financials

I’ve written before about the pain caused by “Uncustomers” – people who will take up a lot of your time but never buy anything. Recently I’ve seen a similar problem [...]

A technology startup that needs funding to succeed needs to prepare a story for potential investors about what it will achieve.  Most of these stories are going to sound in some way similar [...]

This has been on my to-post list for a while. I keep reading it and thinking it’s a good piece so I’ve decided to post it today.  I do wonder if for most startups it might no be very [...]

I’ve long wanted to write something on the topic of how to decide how much money to raise, but I haven’t yet come up with anything I’m happy to share!  Fortunately someone has done a big analysis [...]

I frequently have conversations with entrepreneurs seeking investment, and one thing many of them want to see in a deal is that “I retain over 50% shareholding so I’m in control”. This seems like [...]

Financials projections are a central part of a business plan, and there are two key points about selecting a start date for the financials that I can save you a lot of work…

Let me start with a gross generalisation.  British people don’t like talking about money. When I am negotiating in this country, I almost always find that the customer doesn’t want to talk about [...]

On a couple of occasions recently I have been given advice by customers on issues relating to VAT. On one occasion a customer told me I should not be charging VAT on expenses such as train [...]

Most investors have experience of putting money into a project that looks and sounds very promising, but which ultimately fails because customers don’t actually buy the product (or service),  at [...]

There is no magic formula for calculating sales, or any other figure in a business plan, and there is almost certainly no right answer.  However, there are lots of different rules of thumb that [...]