Investors don't want to talk to the CFO until they're in d. So I've worked with a number of startups, as you would imagine, and the worst thing that I've ever seen is when founders try and send their CFO O in to do the initial pitch with an investor thinking that. That's the way that they'll be able to convince the VC or the angel that they're on top of their numbers and know their game. But the reality is that that actually acts against them. It's a disadvantage because investors want to hear f...
Feb 08, 2023•2 min
If you are the CEO and haven't made a sell, you're not the ceo. The CEO has one role and one role alone, and that is to sell. It may be that you're selling to employees. It may be that you're selling to investors or suppliers, but it may even be that you're selling to customers. Under no misconception, you are selling one way or the other. And if you haven't sold or made a sell, especially to a customer, then as far as I'm concerned, you can't be the CEO because you cannot have understood the pa...
Feb 07, 2023•2 min
Contracts are there for when things fail, so always have one in. It's really easy when you're in a startup to ignore the basics. You know what I'm talking about? It's fine. Let's get them started. We can sort out the paperwork later. They're fine. I've worked with them before. We don't need to do anything in writing. I've been in situations chasing people to sign off contracts after I've already begun working with them and learned quickly never to make that same mistake. it is incredibly dangero...
Feb 06, 2023•2 min
You are not your business however much it may feel. There was a time when I slid into a huge depression over the performance of one of the businesses I was leading. We were struggling on all fronts, unable to bring talent in, pay bills, make payroll, and I took it all incredibly personally. I wrapped up the failings of the business in my own ego, and that led to a downward spiral. The reality is that you are not your business. You can do everything right and still go through rough patches as eve...
Feb 05, 2023•2 min
My business can't be in good shape if my mind and body aren't. This is a pretty personal one but it reminds me of something a client said to me more than a decade ago. He was someone who had struggled with weight and needed to book two seats on a plane to accommodate himself. You'd never have known it to see him. We're in the gym one day, and he said to me, there's no excuse for not taking the time to manage your body and to manage your health, because if you can't manage yourself, how can you b...
Feb 04, 2023•2 min
The buck stops with me. Blaming others for failure is never a good look, but especially when you're in a leadership position. As a leader, you have to own the failures even more so than sharing the successes. Firstly, if you don't, then you're signaling a weakness in leadership because if something went wrong and you weren't at the helm, then the first question I'm gonna ask is, well, who was, and whether you're in a leadership role or not, there's nothing more empowering than owning your mistak...
Feb 03, 2023•2 min
Poor leaders say I. Strong ones say we. We've all seen this before. Really great leaders know that to achieve anything, they need their team behind them to deliver. But there are really awful leaders out there who hog the limelight and see every win as a personal achievement. Conversely, when things go wrong, they're the first to throw others under the bus. But great leaders by building up their teams do a few things. They create an atmosphere of. They create filthy and loyalty, and this is real...
Feb 02, 2023•2 min
Cash flow, balance sheet, profit and loss. In that order. now, a lot of people will be sitting there going, Arish, what are you smoking? Everyone asks me about my revenue. Everyone wants to know what's going on in my p and l, but the reality is that the p and l is a really blunt instrument, and it isn't the one that you should be using to manage your business internally. Why is that? Well, as we learn early on in this podcast, cash trumps everything. That's why you need to focus on the cash flow...
Feb 01, 2023•3 min
Your accountant, and I cannot stress this enough, is not your cfo. I can't tell you the number of founders that I've spoken to that think that their accountants can do the job of their cfo. They assume that anyone with a qualification in accounts is going to be good enough to lead the executive function of their finance department. And I'm here to tell you they are really, really mistaken. So what's the difference between an accountant and a cfo? Well, an accountant typically is someone that doe...
Jan 31, 2023•3 min
Insurance exists for a reason. Plan for the worst, even in the good. I am sure most of you already understand this, but insurance exists in case of the worst happening, not because it assumes, fuck, say 19. Insurance exists for a reason. Plan for the worst, even in the good times. I'm sure most of you understand this. But it bears saying that insurance exists in case the worst happens. It doesn't assume that the worst will happen, and the reality is that for lots of founders, it can be really fr...
Jan 30, 2023•2 min
If you're a leader, you need to learn enough about the elements of your business that are critical to you, but which you are not any good at, and then hire people that can do them way better than you. The reason you need to learn enough about those areas is because you want to be able to ask not just the intelligent questions, but the right questions. A great example of this is I'm a non-technical. But I've started learning Python because I want to be able to converse with my CTO at the right. I...
Jan 29, 2023•2 min
Never burn a relationship. They. So in the last episode I talked about avoiding bad faith actors, but the flip side of that is maintaining great relationships with the people that you build them with. And why do I say that? Well, back in the day when I landed in New Guinea, we had a competitor with whom we had a really poor relationship. And my predecessors never really built a good one with him. There was a lack of trust. He was an ex-employee of ours. And no one really wanted to, no 20. never ...
Jan 28, 2023•2 min
In December of 2022 I released a list of 100 lessons I'd learnt the hard way operating as a CEO & CFO across multiple ventures from startups to scale ups to SME's. I had more than a million impressions on that post, thousands of comments and re-shares and many messages asking me to expand on these points. I'll be releasing a new episode every day for 100 days touching a little further on the headlines. Only a minute or two a day, and at the end you'll know my full list!
Jan 27, 2023•2 min
If you aren't chasing your debts, you ain't gonna get. , let's face it. We've all been there. We've all been left carrying the can of a debt that never gets paid or, or certainly drags out into God knows when. And even as a C F O, I'm guilty of this as well, right? So I've been left holding the can on a couple of debts, which I wish I'd chased a bit harder and a bit faster. because the reality is working with startups, you are always at risk of not getting paid by someone at some point in your c...
Jan 26, 2023•2 min
In December of 2022 I released a list of 100 lessons I'd learnt the hard way operating as a CEO & CFO across multiple ventures from startups to scale ups to SME's. I had more than a million impressions on that post, thousands of comments and re-shares and many messages asking me to expand on these points. I'll be releasing a new episode every day for 100 days touching a little further on the headlines. Only a minute or two a day, and at the end you'll know my full list!
Jan 25, 2023•2 min
Pivoting is a feature and not a bug. So I'm sure you guys have heard this a lot of times before, right? So pivoting is a feature, not a bug. What do I mean by that? Well, anything that's a feature is something that is relevant to that business and is baked into the model, whereas a bug is obviously something you need to squash. And remove effectively from whatever you're doing. The reason I think that pivoting is a feature and not a bug is at very early stages. You are constantly in search of a ...
Jan 24, 2023•3 min
Over Dilution is not a good enough reason not to take money in a down. Okay, let's get real for a second. The last few years leading up to 2022 have been absolutely insane in the venture world. We've seen businesses trading at 20, 30, 40 times their revenue multiples, that's all come crashing back to earth. SAS businesses are trading at five, maybe maximum 10 times their revenue, and lots of other businesses aren't getting funded whatsoever. So as a founder, your one job is to ensure that there ...
Jan 23, 2023•2 min
You have three levers. Increase your revenue, improve your gross margin, or decrease your costs. Let's say your business is struggling at the. You have three levers that you can pull immediately to give you a better chance of survival. The first is increasing your revenues, and you can do this by selling more product to your existing customers, finding new customers, or maybe even raising your price. Now all of this will lead to an improvement in cash flow and to your bottom line. You may want t...
Jan 22, 2023•3 min
Sometimes everything has to burn down in order to be built right back up again. So you could take this as a philosophical statement and absolutely, that's correct, right? Sometimes you need to sort of destroy what you've built in order to build it back better. And you've seen that in lots of businesses that have changed their business model or have moved from one particular sort of sector to another. And you know, a great example of that is something like Flicker, which started off as a video up...
Jan 22, 2023•2 min
A few episodes ago I talked about debt being cheaper than equity and I had someone respond to me in LinkedIn and say that, well, it was a bit more nuanced than that and I was oversimplifying the whole situation and I can't really disagree with that cuz the reality is in a two minute podcast, you're not gonna be able to get across every single scenario in every single case. The reason debt is a two-edged sword is because lots of founders don't really think far enough into the future about how the...
Jan 21, 2023•3 min
Hire slow, fire fast. Okay. I copped a huge amount of flack for this when I released it the first time, but there is a whole bunch of nuance here. I think a lot of people took what I meant to say as, no. Okay, one second. 16 higher, slow fire. Fast. I caught a huge amount of flack for this when I released it on my original list of a hundred lessons, but the reality is I think a lot of people took it to mean the wrong thing. What I'm not advocating for is sending out a text message, sacking 3000 ...
Jan 20, 2023•3 min
Valuation is negotiated. In the last episode I talked a little bit about why it makes sense to take cash, even if you have to dilute yourself a little bit more than you anticipated. But let's talk about valuation itself for a second. The reality is that loads of founders go out with a pitch deck saying they're raising. I dunno, a million pounds at a 10 million pound valuation. But the reality is that that valuation is not something that you set. It's something that your investors will negotiate ...
Jan 19, 2023•2 min
Investors are driven by two things, narrative and return. The first gets 'em through the. And the second dictates the size of the check. Okay. This is pretty broad brush. I get it. But just before I go into the detail of kind of private transactions, think about how the stock market works. When you are buying a stock, someone else is selling it. If everyone had the same information at the same time, there would be no alpha. There'd be no return because everyone would basically be trying to do th...
Jan 18, 2023•2 min
In December of 2022 I released a list of 100 lessons I'd learnt the hard way operating as a CEO & CFO across multiple ventures from startups to scale ups to SME's. I had more than a million impressions on that post, thousands of comments and re-shares and many messages asking me to expand on these points. I'll be releasing a new episode every day for 100 days touching a little further on the headlines. Only a minute or two a day, and at the end you'll know my full list!
Jan 16, 2023•2 min
In December of 2022 I released a list of 100 lessons I'd learnt the hard way operating as a CEO & CFO across multiple ventures from startups to scale ups to SME's. I had more than a million impressions on that post, thousands of comments and re-shares and many messages asking me to expand on these points. I'll be releasing a new episode every day for 100 days touching a little further on the headlines. Only a minute or two a day, and at the end you'll know my full list!
Jan 15, 2023•2 min
In December of 2022 I released a list of 100 lessons I'd learnt the hard way operating as a CEO & CFO across multiple ventures from startups to scale ups to SME's. I had more than a million impressions on that post, thousands of comments and re-shares and many messages asking me to expand on these points. I'll be releasing a new episode every day for 100 days touching a little further on the headlines. Only a minute or two a day, and at the end you'll know my full list!
Jan 14, 2023•2 min
In December of 2022 I released a list of 100 lessons I'd learnt the hard way operating as a CEO & CFO across multiple ventures from startups to scale ups to SME's. I had more than a million impressions on that post, thousands of comments and re-shares and many messages asking me to expand on these points. I'll be releasing a new episode every day for 100 days touching a little further on the headlines. Only a minute or two a day, and at the end you'll know my full list!
Jan 13, 2023•2 min•Season 1Ep. 5
In December of 2022 I released a list of 100 lessons I'd learnt the hard way operating as a CEO & CFO across multiple ventures from startups to scale ups to SME's. I had more than a million impressions on that post, thousands of comments and re-shares and many messages asking me to expand on these points. I'll be releasing a new episode every day for 100 days touching a little further on the headlines. Only a minute or two a day, and at the end you'll know my full list!
Jan 12, 2023•3 min
In December of 2022 I released a list of 100 lessons I'd learnt the hard way operating as a CEO & CFO across multiple ventures from startups to scale ups to SME's. I had more than a million impressions on that post, thousands of comments and re-shares and many messages asking me to expand on these points. I'll be releasing a new episode every day for 100 days touching a little further on the headlines. Only a minute or two a day, and at the end you'll know my full list!
Jan 11, 2023•2 min
In December of 2022 I released a list of 100 lessons I'd learnt the hard way operating as a CEO & CFO across multiple ventures from startups to scale ups to SME's. I had more than a million impressions on that post, thousands of comments and re-shares and many messages asking me to expand on these points. I'll be releasing a new episode every day for 100 days touching a little further on the headlines. Only a minute or two a day, and at the end you'll know my full list!
Jan 10, 2023•2 min•Season 1Ep. 2
