No matter your size, you’ll need financial guidance to gain or maintain momentum.
Photo courtesy of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Christopher Michel.
Medium’s blogger John Cutler wrote an interesting article on startup complexity (Complexity is a Startup Killer. Don’t Grow Up) in which he analyzed how the two advantages of a startup – speed and focus – start to evaporate as your company grows. His advice is to resist the complexity that comes with growth and avoid the temptation to: Let features reproduce; Add endless sales tools; Multiply enhancements; Add more people to the Board; Find more and more partnerships; and Hire “experienced” people.”
To this last part about hiring experienced people, Cutler adds “Company experience doesn’t equate to Startup experience.” As an on-demand CFO at Burkland, I’m a member of a team that enables access to startup experience on a fractional basis, enhancing a Company’s ability to scale up with the guidance of a strategic financial resource – when you need it!
A forward-thinking startup rents before buying whenever possible. Posit the following two scenarios where “renting” a CFO can help you minimize growing pains and burn.
Scenario 1: All the low-hanging fruit is coming your way.
A friend with a green thumb tells me “plants usually die out of an excess – not lack of – water”. Sadly, this is the case for many startups that find money and initial traction come their way relatively easily. I’ve been at more Board meetings than I would like to count in which investors were pushing their portfolio CEOs to scale up faster. On the surface, there is of course nothing wrong with scaling quickly; after all, startups are about speed.
The problem comes when scaling up follows little planning – tracing a horizon based on the initial traction that a talented business development person may have generated. Planning involves understanding how the interdependencies of product delivery, market expectations, and customer management could evolve. If you follow short term thinking without considering longer term context you may find yourself in a quagmire in future growth stages. As your strategic financial partner, people like me can help you craft the right plan.
Burkland CFOs can help develop a sound business model that plans growth looking at likely and unlikely scenarios (developing contingencies for them), and evolves your business in the right direction with models that show how to sustain and improve margins while optimally servicing existing customers. Smart investors look beyond traction, they want to see “smart traction” that doesn’t dry up and lives up to the market challenges you will inevitably face. A sound plan helps you to attract the additional capital and key resource hires you need as you scale, and becomes critical to sustaining momentum.
Scenario 2: You’re struggling to gain momentum.
If you’re losing sleep, it’s most likely because you’re not growing as fast as you expected and the solution is not obvious. You’re draining cash and not building the business growth story you need for your next round of financing which, by the way, is around the corner.
The challenge becomes one of creating processes to drive efficiency, fine-tune key variables such as pricing and levels of service, and buying time to figure out your market and educate prospect customers. You can’t justify hiring a full time CFO given your size, but you need a strategic minded CFO more than ever to stabilize your business, or face dire consequences. A part time CFO from Burkland is a huge asset in your corner to help you find traction. In this case, renting is a no brainer because a hired gun brings the relevant experience you need to figure out how to start sales momentum in context of a plan, as most of us have seen this problem several times even in your own industry.
Lack of traction can be a blessing – just ask SaaS star Slack, which came out of a failed gaming company – if and only if you have the right guidance to know where and how to tweak your model. A strategic CFO from Burkland could give you the partner and coach you need to help solve the puzzle and develop sustained traction.
Please contact me at pkang@burklandassociates.com to speak further. Thanks