Advisory & corporate finance
The cash shortfall, the senior hire, the deal that went elsewhere, the spreadsheet nobody else understood, the margin that drifted. Five different functions, one underlying condition.
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
We caught up with Marina and Adrian to discuss how founders can deal with difficult relationships in the board room with investors. Marina Traversari is a Board Advisor, Link Stone Advisory who has founded, scaled and exited business as senior executive, Chair and Board Advisor and draws from experience at Spherics, Gapsquare, Sage, Oracle and … Continue reading Managing difficult investors in the Board Room
Raising equity is no longer just about the “Hockey Stick” growth chart. It is about transparency. Investors—whether VCs or Angels—are demanding a level of data integrity and ESG compliance that most Series A companies simply don’t have. Richard Spilsbury discusses this shift with Marina Traversari. Having moved from scaling Spherics (a carbon accounting platform) to … Continue reading The “Glass Box” Business: Why Transparency (and ESG) is Your New Valuation Multiplier