Make sure you plan ahead; it’s going to be a bumpy ride no matter what.
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”- Dwight Eisenhower
Developing a financial plan is one of the most beneficial actions you can take as an entrepreneur when starting a business. A financial plan is like a spec for your company; it forces you to translate business strategy into a concrete business plan and to establish an operating roadmap that identifies the timeline for your key business milestones. As you develop your plan, your team and your investors will align on the goals and objectives to move your business forward.
A financial plan is also an essential tool for raising capital. Your projections enable you to determine your business’ funding requirements and communicate the financial opportunity to investors. In discussing your plan with prospective investors, you can demonstrate the financial literacy that investors expect from executive teams.
There are three types of financial plans that every start-up needs: a Long-range Plan, an Annual Budget, and an Intra-year Forecast. Here are some details on each.
1. Long-range Plan
A Long-range Plan is the first financial model a start-up should build. The Long-range Plan should include a 3-5 year outlook, with the number of years determined by how long it will take to prove and scale your business model. You should build the plan with monthly detail for at least the first 2 years, and you can plan the remaining years quarterly or annually.
The Long-range Plan should set your vision for the business model and help you to test the sensitivities of your key business drivers. It is helpful to prepare different scenarios of the model so you can anticipate and plan for different outcomes. I generally recommend preparing a base-case, a best-case and a worst-case scenario.
Investors expect to see your projected funding needs and the business milestones that can be reached in advance of each funding round so that they see a path to scale. You should target enough cash raised between rounds to last at least 12 to 18 months. Think of this plan as building blocks and create it as a detailed bottoms-up plan while keeping a top-down view as a reality check (e.g. what % of the market can we reasonably expect to capture?)
One crucial detail that many new CEOs overlook (sometimes fatally) is to ensure you forecast your cash flow, not just your income. Make sure to account for the timing of working capital (accounts receivable, inventory, accounts payable) collections and payments as well as capital expenditures. Poor working capital management causes many early-stage companies to fail.
2. Annual Budget
The second type of financial projection you should prepare is an Annual Budget, which is a detailed monthly plan for the coming year, generally prepared in the quarter prior to the upcoming fiscal year. The Annual Budget is presented to and approved by your Board of Directors.
It is always a good idea to preview your thinking, assumptions and high-level numbers with your investors before you send them the budget and ask for their approval. Sit down with members of the board that are willing to brainstorm scenarios for the year with you to ensure you get good advice and the buy-in from your board members before the actual board meeting.
Once your Board approves your Annual Budget, it becomes your North Star to measure performance throughout the year. Ensure that every executive team member is involved in the process of creating the Annual Budget, as their input and buy-in to the process is crucial to their performance. I recommend you share the Budget with the entire company to ensure everyone is aligned with the organization’s goals (although some executives prefer to omit sensitive details, such as the timing of cash running out).
3. Intra-year Forecast
As its name suggests, an Intra-year Forecast is simply an update of the budget completed during the year to reflect actual performance to date and an updated view of what is expected for the balance of the year. An Intra-year Forecast is an important tool to manage your cash and make the necessary adjustments to stay as close to the Annual Budget as you can. I recommend preparing an Intra-year Forecast at least 3 times per year – at the beginning of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th quarters.
As the quote at the beginning of this article says, “plans are worthless but planning is everything.” In general, reality significantly deviates from your plans. By having a plan, you will quickly identify when business and market conditions have diverged from expectations and you will be prompted to quickly react and adapt. One of the most useful things that on-demand CFOs like us can help you with is to develop Long-range Plans, Annual Budgets and Intra-year Forecasts to help you plan, monitor and grow your business with confidence.
Here are some useful articles that dive deeper on these three essential types of financial projections.
http://avc.com/2010/04/projections-budgeting-and-forecasting/
http://avc.com/2010/05/scenarios/
http://avc.com/2010/05/budgeting-in-a-small-early-stage-company/
http://avc.com/2010/06/forecasting/