This is a question every entrepreneur should know the answer to. The answer is that cash is more important in the short-term but both are as important in the long-term. In the short-term, you can make losses and as long as shareholders have put in sufficient cash into the business,…
Managing a business isn’t easy and if you don’t know much about finance, it’s a sure-fire way of running into trouble. The first thing any entrepreneur or manager has to learn is how to understand some basic finances. Once you learn the basics, it is critical to add to your…
Raising funding for startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) or even large projects is still a difficult and painful process out there. I had a long discussion with an experienced consultant recently who works with tech startups and his prognosis for the smaller end of fund-raising circa £250,000 was…
My blog on the 10 minute guide to understanding a Balance Sheet is the most read even though it is also the longest and tries to deal with some complex items in a simple way – http://bit.ly/XMTzfa I used Apple’s balance sheet for 2012 and since a year or more has…
Every business at some stage has to evaluate projects or investments and choose the ones that will benefit the business most. Usually, it will be faced with a limited budget and spending this capital wisely is critical. This process is called capital budgeting and the most used decision making tools…
Businesses have to make investment decisions all the time. Deciding on whether to proceed with a project can be tricky if you are faced with multiple projects with differing profits and timelines. The most useful tool to use in such situations is net present values (NPVs). In an earlier blog,…
If you’re looking to raise funds for your startup, the first question an investor will ask is what’s the return? And if you think that’s easy, it’s the annual profit divided by the investment, you’ll be wrong, e.g. annual profits of £75,000 with an investment required of £250,000 gives a…
Starting a New Year, every business, well maybe almost everyone, will set goals for the new year. Planning and setting business goals for most is an annual event and sometimes it’s called a budget! However, I want to recommend a different course in setting your key business goals. It maybe…
Do banks lend to startups any more? Probably not is the answer in the current climate. Since the financial crisis, most banks do not lend to startups nor to most businesses they would have before the crisis hit. However, there maybe the odd startup that’s got a business plan and sufficient…
KPIs’ (Key Performance Indicators) are set up for absolutely anything these days from measuring SEO performance to customer satisfaction and it’s easy to get submerged in a sea of indicators. Everyone talks about them and mentions them in such jargon that it is vital to keep a clear head of…