2015’s a hair’s breadth away. As you start next
year’s planning, here are 5 things you can do to give yourself the best chance
of securing new investors in your business – either debt or equity.
1. Have
your financials in order
The first thing any investor is going to ask for
is your historic financials,
so you should have them ready and in a useable format. At Lighter Capital, we
like to see 24 months of historic financials for both the P&L and the
Balance Sheet. Some investors may require less, but at the minimum, I would
suggest having the quarterly financials for the last 12 months ready. You
should know that any institutional lending source is going to require that you
produce monthly financials so this is something to think about as you head to
market.
- The easiest way to determine if your
financials are ready to be seen by an outside financing source is to have
someone with an accounting background take a quick look at them. This can be as
simple as asking your tax accountant
to review, and now is a good time to ask them before they get slammed by
year-end tax returns. They’ll let you know if you are doing anything blatantly
wrong from an accounting prospective. I won’t sweat the small mistakes but if
you have negative revenue or assets that could be a liability, they can help
you make those changes easily. If you run into bigger issues, you might want to
consider getting outside help from a CPA or controller, like our friends at
Early Growth Financials.
- There are a few different types of accounting methodologies:
cash, accrual, and modified accrual. It’s good to understand the pros and cons
of accrual and cash accounting of each methodology before choosing one to
implement. For example, a common error we see with accrual accounting is that
many entrepreneurs only make adjustments at year-end, where this methodology
actually requires monthly adjustments. This makes for a confusing P&L. For
small business, it’s easier to just do cash accounting if you can understand
it, and it helps you become very familiar with your company’s cash situation.
Don’t feel that you have to use accrual accounting because that is GAAP
standard. Lots of investors deal with different types of accounting
methodologies, so they can read whatever statements you give them as long as
they are accurate.
2.
Projections – know where you’re headed
As we enter the New Year, it’s good to have a
sense for where you’re going and projections help you get there. The most
helpful projections are not the ones that just take a growth percentage and
apply it on a monthly or quarterly basis, but the ones that are based on your
pipeline and historic performance.
- Things to keep in mind include seasonality:
are you a seasonal business, and if so, do your projections reflect it? Do you
have some big customer wins projected over the next 12 months and when do you
expect them? Do you have big payments to vendors or debt sources? Be sure to
include them in the projections, including any adjustments needed to reach
these goals and how they’ll be layered in over the next year (i.e. additional
employees, larger commissions for sales, advertising and technology spend, and
product development plans, etc.).
- As if that wasn’t enough to consider in your
projections, you might want to think about having two sets — a tortoise and a
hare. Your ‘hare’ scenario is a high growth shoot-to-the-moon scenario for
equity investors and the ‘tortoise’ is a more stable, plodding scenario for
debt investors.
- If this seems like a lot, a basic set using
growth percentages and margins works well and at least gives your investors a
place to start when evaluating the outlook for the next year.
3. Explain
your customer base
Everyone will want to know something about your
customers. If you put together a basic chart (like the one below) for your top
10 customers, you’ll help fend off 90% of potential questions.
If you have customers that represent more than
10% of your annual revenue, expect some type of follow-up questions from
interested investors who might ask to see copies of the contract, request
reference checks, and review historic churn in your customer base.
4. Service
/ Product Elevator Pitch
Now that you have the boring (or if you’re me,
exciting) financials portion out of the way, you’ll need to explain what your
company does. Try to make your product pitch concise and easy for people to
understand. In Lighter Capital’s 10-minute online application, we call it the
elevator pitch and we limit it to 500 words. After you have investors hooked,
you can get into more details like the market (i.e. “the white space”) and the
details of your service or product and why it is unique.
5. White
Space – highlight your competitive difference
You have to present where you sit within the
marketplace. How is your product or service different from the others out there
and why? Telling someone that you are the next Facebook or Instragram isn’t
really the best explanation of your positioning, and honestly, most people are
just going to roll their eyes and say, “Sure you are.” Instead, present the lay
of the land, demo your product, tell your customer stories, and focus on the
problem your product is addressing or solving. Be truthful with your plan! At
the end of the day, investors who want to invest in your business also want to
invest in you. So demonstrating your inspiration and ability to execute the
plan will help differentiate you from your competitors. Continue
reading…
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