Build Credible Financials and a Defensible Valuation For Fundraising
If you’re currently raising funding for your pre-seed, seed or Series A round or researching the best ways to raise money during the early stages of your company, you need an effective communication tool that can help you articulate your vision to potential investors, underscore the compelling reasons your venture deserves their financial backing and make a convincing case for your desired valuation.
By properly building a financial model, you can:
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Clearly link your strategic decisions to financial results
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Calculate all the important metrics
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Substantiate your valuation
The resulting comprehensive financial plan will embody your 5-year growth strategy, which reflects interdependencies between all business functions. At the same time, it will create alignment among all stakeholders and offer a clear blueprint for execution.
Specifically, this plan will illustrate your path to profitability by:
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Pinpointing the break-even point
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Outlining the frequency of fundraising rounds
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Identifying the financial requirements for each round, the revenue targets and costs across all income streams
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Prescribing the methodical steps to achieve them all, culminating in a credible final valuation
Interested in a complimentary 30-minute financial model review?
This is critical to your fundraising if you are an early-stage startup founder and:
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You’re overwhelmed with the demands of launching your business and lack the time or inclination to learn about finance or pursue an MBA degree
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You know you need to create credible financials for your startup, but the field of finance intimidates you and leaves you uncertain about where to begin
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Finance doesn’t intimidate you, but you find yourself lacking the necessary financial knowledge and tools to translate your business plan into a financial model and determine a fair company valuation
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Or, like many of our clients and students, you think it’s an insurmountable challenge to create credible assumptions and predict your company’s financial performance at such an early stage
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Or, you’ve made attempts to create your own financial model using readily available templates from the internet, but you’ve been unsuccessful attracting investors with your previous efforts
The result:
A complete financial model with all the KPIs
5-year growth strategy, including:
- Revenue launch timeline
- Pricing strategy for each revenue stream
- Go-to-market strategy for each revenue stream
- Expenses: operating, capital expenditures, and working capital
Funding requirements
Valuation
Interested in a complimentary 30-minute financial model review?
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Our Process:
4-6 weeks for tech startups, 6-8 weeks for product startups
Evaluate
You’ll receive a detailed questionnaire designed to guide the creation of a financial model and company valuation. Within this questionnaire, we delve into various aspects, such as revenue streams, pricing strategy, costs, and any interdependencies related to the product development timeline and go-to-market strategies. Additionally, we review your marketing and financial plans, market analysis, competitive research and any other pertinent data.
Formulate
We collaborate with you through the questionnaire and address any missing information, ensuring the development of essential assumptions for your financial model. We assist you to map out how these assumptions convert to financial outcomes.
Model
We then consolidate all the requirements and create the first draft of your company’s financial model. This initial draft encompasses all parts of your strategy and illustrates their interconnections. The resulting financial model contains:
- Monthly revenue forecast
- Monthly variable cost forecast
- Monthly or yearly salaries forecast
- Yearly operating budget
- Monthly working capital projections
- Monthly fixed asset projections
- Yearly Income Statement
- Balance sheet and cash flow statements
- Use of funds
- Yearly free cash flow forecast
- Valuation
- Financial summary with all the key ratios and financial metrics specific to your business
- Break-even analysis
Analyze and Refine
In the final step of our process, we analyze the results and make adjustments to the model, if necessary, to ensure the resulting forecast is conservative, accurately reflects your strategy and positions you in the best light for investors.
SAMPLE # HOURS and TIMELINE
Step | Tech Startup | Product Startup |
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Assumption Formulation | 5-15 hours, 2-3 weeks | 5-15 hours, 2-4 weeks |
First Model Draft | 15-25 hours, 2-3 weeks | 20-30 hours, 3-4 weeks |
Revisions and Model Reviews | 5-8 hours, 1 week | 5-10 hours, 1 week |
Integration of Existing Financial Results | 5-10 hours, 1-2 weeks | 5-15 hours, 1-3 weeks |
*Contact us for a quote. The hourly rate depends on the company stage. Starts at $6,000.
** If you have existing operations, we will need additional time to align the model with the bookkeeping systems and integrating current financial results.
Still have questions?
We are happy to talk to you. Book a FREE 30-min consultation now by pressing the button below and, as a bonus, we will send you a COMPLIMENTARY financial health checklist.