Advisory & corporate finance
Revenue was up, clients were coming on, the team was growing. Then someone looked at the margin line. It had moved quietly in the wrong direction. The value leak is easy to miss because it lives inside the numbers that are working.
There is probably a spreadsheet somewhere in your business doing something important that one person built and nobody else fully understands. It works. It has always worked. It is still a house of cards.
You sent your commercial director and they came back without the result. Not because they did anything wrong, but because the other side wanted you. At 10% growth the founder sales bottleneck stops being an inconvenience.
The CV was strong and the board was reassured. Six months later there is more process but not more progress. This is one of the most common scaling challenges founders face, and one of the least discussed.
Revenue is up and cash is tight. The growth cash trap is not bad accounting; it is the gap between what your P&L reports and what your cash position reflects.
In short Approval once does not mean approval again Test whether you are an ‘undertaking in difficulty’ Keep real risk to investor capital Measure gross assets before the share issue Investors who join the board may count as employees Watch the 30% rule across equity and debt Knowledge intensive status can apply retrospectively If you … Continue reading Avoid later phase EIS pitfalls
In short Six things HMRC will look for in a first application Apply the risk to capital ‘gateway’ test Apply the independence test Check for excluded trades and borderline activities Check the employment test No blanket applications for speculative filings Check the share class and use of funds qualify EIS is a valuable venture tax … Continue reading Avoid first time EIS pitfalls
In short Finance says ‘no’ rather than telling you how More accounting staff than salespeople Management accounts take three weeks or longer Forecasts cannot be updated to support a decision Margin by product or project is unknown Cash flow still surprises you If your financial setup is frustrating you, then you could notice the following … Continue reading Six Warning Signs About Your Finance Set Up
Financial models are powerful tools used for a variety of purposes to assess forward looking financial information to overcome limitations of relying only historic information Some of the best uses for financial models are: We support clients build financial models for a range of business requirements, from simple forecasts to developed models to support decision-making. … Continue reading How financial modelling can help improve business decision-making
In short The wrong business model, lifted from earlier work Complexity nobody else can follow Assumptions with no reliable data behind them Inconsistent formatting and colour coding Broken links between sheets and files No error checks and no validation Six common mistakes people often make when performing financial modelling: We support clients build financial models … Continue reading Six common mistakes in financial modelling