Startup Advisory Services
Raising funds is the lifeline of every startup, but the bread and butter of every founder life is the daily struggle with balancing the burn rate, available runway with investors expectations of potential growth and the business strategy. Out advisory services are designed to support you in both the short-term and long-term aspects of the day-to-day business.
Advisory Service for Tech Startups
While raising funds is extremely time-consuming, but it’s also limited and temporary while the company’s operation is constantly working.
It's easy to drown in tons of fires you need to put out every single day, but to get the business where you want it to be in 5 or 10 years a leader has to constantly work on its business strategy.
Our strategic advisory services help you in two parallel pillars: short-term advisory and long-term advisory.
The real struggle in a startup life goes beyond the fundraising process. While raising funds from potential investors or existing shareholders is time-consuming it’s also a limited and temporary effort, while the company’s operation is constantly working.
A startup might invest a significant amount of time in fine-tuning its valuation and financial plans for the funding round or answering due diligence questions, but, the business still has goals to meet. To achieve its long-term goals, every startup has to set short-term measurable milestones that will get it closer and closer towards the end goal.
It’s easy to get distracted on the way and drown in tons of fires you need to put out every single day, but to get the business where you want it to be in 5 or 10 years a leader has to constantly work on its business strategy.
And this is where Finro comes in.
Short-Term Advisory Services
Our short-term advisory services are focused on topics closer to the operation and the day-to-day life of the business. Here are some examples:
1. Short-term planning: proper cash flow management can make or break a startup. No matter how solid your business model is or how tight your service offering is, the business is effectively dead if you have no money in the bank to pay employees and suppliers. Building a short-term plan attached to the company's roadmap is a powerful tool to manage your burn rate, work more efficiently in the boundaries of your runway and help you achieve your short-term goals.
We'll dig into your current spending to understand what you're spending your money on right now. We'll combine that data with your future milestones to build an accurate and detailed cash flow budget so you'll stay on top of the business and well within the boundaries of your runway.
2. KPI analysis: to achieve the company's long-term growth strategy, a startup needs to set measurable and realistic short-term targets that will create that gradual growth towards its long-term goals. The first step is to decide which KPIs are relevant to the business, define these KPIs specifically for this business, set the process to track these KPIs, and choose the right ones to highlight in investor updates and board presentations.
3. Investor updates: the monthly investor update is critical for startup founders to keep their investors up to speed. It's the primary tool to provide their point of view of its progress, highlight primary KPIs and bring up important topics. Together, we'll pinpoint the critical KPIs to highlight at the top of the update and the other KPIs to mention and track. We'll craft together the topics to discuss and present them to get the proper engagement that you're looking for from these updates.
4. Board presentations: before significant strategic decisions, the company's board asks you to show the progress made so far specific topic, the status of the KPIs, financial updates, and even potential mergers or other strategic initiatives.
Together, we'll build a clear and concise deck that does not only provide information or raise a problem to the board. But also suggest solutions to the current issues and show their impact on the business. We'll strengthen any case you present with the correct data, support, and visual aids needed to make this case well in front of the board.
5. Burn Rate Analysis: the short-term aspects of a business are not just KPIs, presentations, and planning. The most significant element of the startup life is to keep the burn rate low enough to maintain the business and attract top talent. The first part of that is proper planning and constantly tracking the company's spending. The other part of this is continuously looking for improvements, cost savings, and cash savings to improve cash utilization and reduce the burn rate. Our structured burn rate analysis and cash saving process enables us to find good opportunities in eligible businesses.
Long-Term Advisory Services
Our long-term advisory services are focused on strategic topics that touch on strategic decisions and future initiatives. Here are a few examples:
1. Long-range planning: estimating the startup's performance in the next 3 to 5 years is crucial when considering different strategic decisions. Building a detailed yet easy-to-follow and straightforward long-range plan makes it easier to test new business scenarios and how each one of them impacts the business growth and financial performance.
While long-range planning and short-term planning are very similar and use the same language, terms, and information, they look at different aspects of the business. While the short-term planning considers the spending timing and supplier terms to assure maximum accuracy, the long-range planning takes a high-level approach to see how a particular business initiative will impact the business or what changes to make if we take a specific decision.
2. Competitive analysis: knowing the competitive landscape is a powerful tool for every business that could help you understand how's your offering stands compared to the market leader and your direct competitors. Looking at your competitors' offerings could also help in the strategic planning process. It could help you know what products are must-have offerings in the market and how to differentiate your business from the rest of the herd.
3. M&A Advisory: a typical acquisition or merger transaction involves many different parts that you and your company need to take care of.
It starts from understanding the need that we're trying to solve with the transaction. If the business is looking to expand fast and needs to hire many employees in a short period, an acquihire deal where you acquire a company for its employees could make more sense.
If the business is looking to fill a gap in its offering that all its competitors have, acquiring an IP and some employees that could implement it into the company could make sense.
If the company is looking to expand into a new business, acquiring a minor player in that niche and leveraging its technology and the knowledge of employees could be a good fit.
With M&A, a company can solve any problem, but it needs to use the right strategy.
Beyond the transaction itself, the company needs to take care of the financial aspect of the deal, due diligence, implementations, potential legal problems, and many more.
We will walk you through the entire M&A process, get you the correct data to make the decision that fits your business, and help you sell that to the board.
The Boutique Alternative
Experienced. Flexible. Professional.
Finro was founded in 2014 to offer clients an alternative to bureaucratic, high-priced due diligence, valuation, and financial modeling services.
Understanding that every situation is different and every client has their own concerns and expectations, Finro’s solutions are customized for every project.
