With a strong pitch deck as the difference between a funding lead and a funding dead end, it is worth an entrepreneur’s time and energy to create a compelling and accurate presentation. Here are our best tips for building the perfect pitch deck to win over investors, including an emphasis on the financials, which play a critical role in whether or not an investor moves forward. Investors are ultimately asking “is there an opportunity to make substantial money here?” and your financials help them answer that question more than any other aspect of your presentation.
Raising outside capital can be exciting for an entrepreneur who is ready to accelerate their business to the next stage. Much like exit planning, raising capital is a process best started early to give you time to get to know your potential investors and vice versa. In this post, we talk through how to identify your ideal investors, followed by some practical steps to winning them over as partners and how to make the most of the fundraising experience.
Whether you operate a mature, consistently profitable business or a loss-generating startup, cash flow is the oxygen of your business operations. Even for companies generating positive net income, poor cash flow management consistently ranks as a leading cause of business failure. If you only have the bandwidth as a CEO to focus on one financial metric, tracking and understanding cash flow can help you avoid failure and is essential to sustainably operating, growing, and selling a business.
Change and growth are part of life, especially for anyone running a small to medium-sized business. For many, exit planning implies a sale to private equity (PE) or an acquisition by an industry strategic, but in reality, businesses undergo multiple transitions from one stage of operation to another. Whether your business is transitioning from a pre-revenue stage, shifting from a growth to profit focus, initiating a fundraising round, or putting the company up for sale, a great CFO, whether full-time or fractional, will always have your company prepared. Here is a close look at the CFO’s role in exit planning and business transitions.
In the start-up world, it is nearly impossible not to be distracted by all the noise around Unicorns and feel pressure to match the pattern of always getting to the next round of funding. The venture capital mantras of “go faster”, “hockey stick growth”, “multiples upon multiples”, and “crush the competition” are a lot of pressure for founding teams. But what start-up founders need to know is that there is a different way to build a business where you take less capital, keep control and still get to a meaningful exit. Here are the key ingredients to make it happen.
As we look forward to the new year, many of us are finding it challenging to plan for our businesses with economic uncertainty still looming. The difficulty of predicting when we might start to see economic recovery and determining what that means for our business and growth leaves us all wishing we had a crystal ball. At Ascent CFO, we have been working with our clients to address the unknown by building out scenarios that plan for a slow economic recovery with flexibility that allows for acceleration should we see recovery happen sooner than forecasted. Here are a few tips that you may find helpful to put your company in a conservative, yet opportunistic position.
