High-Growth Company CFO Services

"All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem" - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Congratulations, you have developed an offering that customers want and sales are taking off! This is what you dreamed about but there seem to be as many issues now as there were when you were just starting out...

As businesses grow and move out of the start-up phase, a new set of issues arise that Arena Consulting can help you address through its CFO and business advisory services:

Tweak your business model - What took you from start-up to high-growth business has served you well, but are there ways you can tweak your business model to make the machine hum even better? Arena can review your existing model and help you create functional strategies that are more mutually supportive and will take you to the next level of growth:

  • Product Strategy - what new features need to be introduced over time?
  • Operations Strategy - what will continue to be done in-house vs outsourced?
  • Sales Strategy - what other customers and geographies will you target over time?
  • Marketing Strategy - how will you promote your offerings?
  • People Strategy - who will be the key hires and what can you contract out?

Create a robust budget model - Financial projections should play a big role in helping you manage your business and secure required capital but without a CFO to help it can be one of those things that always gets pushed down the priority list. A good financial model shows you understand the key revenue drivers, cost drivers and balance sheet assumptions behind your business. The model will also help you identify how much investment you need and how big you expect to become. Arena works as your outsourced CFO and can help you develop a solid "bottom-up" financial model that clearly identifies the key assumptions underlying the numbers and enables you to measure actual performance against budget.

Formulate your financing strategy - Do you have a clear and realistic plan for how you will fund your growth? Arena has a deep understanding of the types of financing available to high-growth companies. We can identify what mix makes sense for your business, develop a plan for pursuing funding sources and work with our contacts to help you at each step through to closing.

Develop an investor-ready presentation - Investors expect a short, powerful presentation that knocks their socks off. Unfortunately, the so-called "Curse of Knowledge" prevents many entrepreneurs from clearly communicating their concepts and technologies. Arena has extensive experience in creating and critiquing investor-ready presentations and brings a valuable external perspective. Along with developing investor presentations, we can coach on presentation skills and critique dry-runs.

Develop an investor-ready business plan - Overwhelming positive feedback from customers and a good presentation will more than make-up for lack of a formal written business plan. That said, going through the planning process forces you to create succinct answers to many of the big questions investors will ask. Arena can critique your plan to identify weaknesses and recommend ways to address them.

Form business systems - Developing strong, integrated and mutually supportive business systems in your high-growth venture is critical to maximize the efficiency in which your limited resources are employed. As an outsourced CFO, we can help create these, enabling you to focus on growing the business:

  • Accounting & Finance
    • Accounting System - Produce the numbers necessary to measure and manage your business.
    • Reporting - Create powerful financial reporting systems to provide performance visibility to your board, investors and management team.
    • Analysis - Use Arena to dig beneath the numbers looking at issues such as product line margins and customer profitability
    • Policies - Implement bookkeeping, control and audit policies to minimize fraud risk, lower credit risk and ensure timely, accurate and compliant reporting.
  • Sales
    • Reporting & Analysis - Create powerful sales reporting systems to provide performance visibility to your management and sales teams. If you have data, we can mine it for information using Tableau as our primary database analysis tool.
    • Customer Management - Help implement systems to better manage customer relationships.
    • Pricing - Develop tools to establish consistent and profitable pricing.
  • Operations - Ensure effective production planning and performance measurement.
  • Product & Service - formalize new product development criteria and and product introduction processes to increase your success ratio.
  • Human Resources
    • Appraisals - As the number of employees grows, establishing an employee review process is important for getting the most from your people.
    • Compensation - Develop strategies to balance salary, bonus incentives, options and other benefits to recruit and retain key talent.

Provide due diligence and financing negotiation support - If you are pursuing angel, VC or bank financing, navigating the due diligence and negotiation process can be daunting - especially without a full-time CFO. We provide as-needed CFO support and a valuable objective perspective in due diligence preparation and term sheet negotiation.

Strategy Session Facilitation - Need someone to help you and your team "step back" from the day-to-day and think about the big picture?  Arena can work with you to develop an agenda for your retreat, facilitate the sessions, deliver a written summary of the outcomes and follow-up on action steps.