Raising

What goes in the deck, and what goes behind it.

A deck is a story with a few numbers in it. What sits behind the deck is the model, and the model is the thing that gets opened after a meeting goes well. If the two don't agree, that meeting was the last one.

Build the pack free, starting from a subscription business, or read on for what belongs in each half.

Nobody expects a founder to be an accountant. What they do expect is that the numbers hold together, and that you know which single assumption the whole plan rests on.

Here's what belongs in each half.

The three statements

The income statement says what you earned over a period. The balance sheet says what you own and owe on one day. The cash flow statement says where the money actually went.

All three get asked for, because a company can look profitable on paper and still run out of money. Profit that's sitting in a customer's accounts payable pays nobody's rent. The three pages together are what makes that visible, and any one of them alone hides it.

If you've never read one, start with what a balance sheet is saying. It's the page most founders skip, and the one that catches the mistakes.

The one page summary

Years across the top, and the handful of lines someone reads first. Revenue and what it grew. Gross profit and the margin under it. Net income. Cash at the end of each year. EBITDA, because that's the number a lender converts into a coverage ratio.

This is the page that gets read. The three statements are the pages that get checked. Both have to exist, and they have to be the same model.

Unit economics

What one customer costs to get, and what one customer is worth. Four numbers carry most of it.

• What you spend to acquire one customer
• What that customer pays, first order and then monthly
• The gross margin on what they pay
• How long they stay

Put those four together and the arithmetic argues for itself. You don't have to defend it with a story, which is the point. Say one point of retention moves the year-three number more than anything else in your plan. You want to find that out before someone else does. That's the churn calculation, and it takes a minute.

The questions a first meeting asks

• How many customers, and where do they come from?
• What does one cost to get, and is that number going up or down?
• What's the gross margin, and why is it that number and not a different one?
• What's your lowest cash month, and how much do you need to get past it?
• What's the headcount at the end of the plan, and what does each person do?
• Which single assumption, if it's wrong, breaks the whole thing?

The last one is the real question. Everything else is checking whether you've thought about it. A model is how you answer it without guessing, because you can change the assumption and watch what happens to all three pages at once.

The pack this builds

Answer the questions in the app and you get these, all from the one set of assumptions.

• Financial Summary the one page, with the years across the top
• Income Statement revenue, cost of revenue, operating expenses, interest and tax
• Balance Sheet what you own, what you owe, and the check row that proves it ties
• Cash Flow Statement operations, investing, financing, and the cash you end with
• Sources and Uses of Capital where the money came from and what it went on
• Management Discussion the plan written out in sentences, from the figures themselves

It's free to build the whole pack and read every page. You don't have to pay to find out whether the model says something worth taking to a meeting.

Build the pack

What the full model adds

• The Excel workbook has a monthly sheet sitting behind the statements, which is the first thing a careful reader asks for.
• The print pack sends every page to your printer or to a PDF in one job. The pack you send is the pack you read.
• Compare puts a base case, an upside and a downside side by side. That's a better answer to the last question than a sentence is.
• The balance sheet check row runs on every version of the plan, so a change you make at midnight can't quietly break the pages.

The pricing page lists what comes with each plan. Nothing here is financial, tax or legal advice, and the numbers are only ever as good as the assumptions you give them.