Category: Fundraising

What to include (and leave out) in Board financials

Many a post has been written about rules of thumb for holding effective Board meetings.  People should be present, meaning actually focused on the meeting and not doing other work (this one from Brad Feld at Foundry).   There should be an Executive Session scheduled with plenty of time for it (this one via Fred Wilson of USV).  I’m going to focus in particular how presenting financials can be done in order to maximize value and keep things focused on what is really important.
First of all, whatever you present as the CFO, it needs to be distributed ahead of time, preferably at least 72 hours.  This is one hard and fast rule that I try not to violate whenever possible.  There is nothing worse as the CFO than numbers that go out the night before an 8am meeting.  It’s not just Board members that hate this.  It invites scrutiny and questions, and is a signal – I am big on signaling – that management doesn’t quite have its act together.
What should be in the package?  Here are the things I minimally include in businesses that have a meaningful monthly cadence – which most build stage companies do.  For some it’s weekly; an example is an app where week-over-week growth is a meaningful metric.
  • Last month’s P&L vs. original forecast, and YTD vs. forecast
  • Last month’s P&L vs. prior month – dollars view
  • Last month’s P&L vs. prior month – unit economics view (meaning, take your P&L, and divide everything by the unit that’s most important in your business.  Could be square feet, available days for appointments, hours sold, hats – you name it)
  • Meaningful YoY stats by product line, location, or some other way to give investors an idea of where growth is (or is not coming from)
  • Headcount summary – by department, where are we against plan?  For many startups, this is where cash either gets burned (hiring too fast) or revenue growth is thwarted (because you can’t find the right head of marketing and while this saves you money in the short run, it means you are not driving top line in the medium-term)
  • Rolling forecast vs. original projection – meaning, if I re-forecast the business for the rest of the year (which you should be doing on an almost constant basis), where am I going to end up
  • Cash projection
If you have these ready to go 3 days ahead of time in well-formatted slides with pithy color commentary, you’ll serve everyone well.  You might need to add a few more based the particular business that you’re in, but this should get everyone grounded in the results and communicate how things are going.  Investors will have the opportunity to look through the numbers and draw some initial conclusions, which will make the financials review section of the meeting much smoother.
Your goal as the CFO is to let the strategic discussion take center stage and let the numbers support that discussion.
Caveat: sometimes you will have Board members/observers who do not read numbers early no matter how early you provide them, and are going to ask nitpick questions about one obscure figure that you know is not vital to anything.  Take a deep breath and go with it.  It’s not constructive behavior, and with any luck, the other Board members will talk to this person offline about expectations.  Your role is to set them high, and keep them there.

Accounting and finance people

In an earlier post, I suggested that there are 2 kinds of people in business, those who have the money and those who need the money. I stand by this oversimplification. To it, let me add another one about accounting people vs. finance people.

As someone who became a CFO having never been either, this took me some time to figure out.

Accounting is about portraying the past as accurately as possible. Debits and credits. Extreme attention to detail. Process. Tying out pennies. Having the equity roll work exactly a certain way. On average, this attracts a certain personality type: precise, introverted and someone who operates well at ground level. This kind of person is absolutely essential and vital to have in any business and especially one that is growing quickly. They provide the data for the early warning systems. They strive to eliminate ambiguity.

Where I’ve had to adapt is in describing how the output should look and what it all means. I can look at a balance sheet and quickly tell if something doesn’t make sense. Deep in the weeds accountants, even really good ones, most often cannot. Frequently this has frustrated me; when I get a statement that can’t possibly reflect reality, it makes me doubt the accounting that was behind it.

Although sometimes this is right, I’ve had to unlearn this reflex. That’s because this is finance. Finance is about making sense of the results, communicating them, and trying to predict the future. It’s about a lot more than that but this is it at its heart.

Finance people, of which I am one, often lack the patience for accounting. It’s a little more right brain than left. Yes, you need the skills to build a pivot table or a model. First though, you need to know what you are looking for. Ambiguity is your friend. This is the part that CFOs are good at, or should be. That mindset is very different than being particularly OCD about the accounting for stock-based comp.

Over time I have learned to appreciate both and tried to adapt in particular to working with skilled accountants. I respect what they do, and know that I couldn’t do it. I hope that they can appreciate what I do as well.

Time kills deals

I’ve been in the middle of a lot of transactions: fundraisings, M&A, partnerships, and deals within and across divisions of the same business. They all have one thing in common, which is that they are not done until they are done. More and more, hiring is becoming a high-stakes transaction, and it too is a perishable one. Put another way: time kills deals.

It kills me when people celebrate prematurely on deals. So much can go wrong between “almost there” and crossing the finish line. People leave companies. New management or investors can have new priorities. The market can shift. Fashion changes. Employees or other franchisees can do stupid things. Cash becomes more scarce, or if you are the one looking to invest it, the your target company may rethink if they need it. Geopolitics have killed more deals than I can count.

This is why I give transactions very high priority in juggling different clients. If I have one raising money, those phone calls get priority. I sometimes have to juggle a lot of things around for this (it’s one reason I hired an assistant). The others know that when it’s their turn, they’ll get the same treatment. I suggest that when you’re in deal mode, you do the same and insist that your advisors do as well.