New Venture CFO Services

"It's always better to have your own thing going" - Spike Lee

Start-ups succeed by creating unique products and services that address significant customer needs. They innovate and execute better than their competitors and can secure the financing necessary to fund growth.

As your outsourced CFO and business advisor, Arena helps you navigate the start-up process, working with you to turn your dreams into reality. Depending on your stage of development, Arena can help:

Refine your value proposition - Can you summarize what your company does and how it differentiates itself from the competition in a simple way a normal person can understand? Arena helps you create a short, powerful "elevator pitch" describing your company's reason for being.

Detail your business model - A great technology or concept is not enough to succeed, it must be matched with a strong business model that specifies how you will "go-to-market" and make money. Arena helps you create a killer business model using a process that includes:

• Consumer and Market Analysis
• Channel Review and Value Chain Analysis
• Competitive Analysis
• Marketing Mix Development: product, price, place, promotion

We can diagram your necessary network of relationships with third parties including suppliers, research partners, professional service firms, etc. that combine to form your "extended enterprise".

Validate your concept - Investors want to see as much real feedback from the market as you can get. Arena can develop a creative plan to get as much third-party feedback on your product/service offering at the lowest cost possible.

Create functional strategies - Arena helps create mutually supportive strategies for the key functions within your start-up venture:

• Product Strategy - what features will be introduced over time?
• Operations Strategy - what will be done in-house vs outsourced?
• Sales Strategy - what 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?

Formulate your financing strategy - Do you have a clear and realistic plan for how you will fund your start-up? Arena has a deep understanding of the types of financing available to start-ups. 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 (and customers) expect a short, powerful presentation that knocks their socks off. Unfortunately, the so-called "Curse of Knowledge" prevents many entrepreneurs from being able to communicate their concepts and technologies in ways people can understand. 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 make-up for lack of a formal written business plan. That said, most investors will want to see one and going through the planning process forces you to create succinct answers to many of the big questions investors will ask. Arena can either write it from scratch or critique your plan to identify weaknesses and recommend ways to address them.

Create a robust financial model - Financial projections will form part of the business plan. Investors will take the numbers with a grain of salt, but a good model shows you understand the key revenue drivers, cost drivers and balance sheet assumptions behind your start-up. The model will also help you identify how much investment you need and how big you expect to become. Arena can help you develop a solid "bottom-up" financial model that clearly identifies the key assumptions underlying the numbers.

Design and implement business systems - Developing strong, integrated and mutually supportive business systems in your start-up is critical to maximize the efficiency in which your limited resources are employed:

• Accounting & Finance - Implement a system to produce the numbers necessary to measure and manage your busines.
• Sales Reporting & Analysis - Create powerful sales reporting systems to provide performance visibility to the sales team and management.
• Operations - From order processing and quality control to procurement and inventory management, Arena can help you produce and deliver your products and services faster and more reliably.
• Compensation Structure - Develop strategy to balance salary, bonus incentives, options and other benefits to recruit and retain key talent.
• Recruiting - Establish rigorous and consistent candidate screening and new hire system.

Provide due diligence and financing negotiation support - If you are pursuing seed fund, angel or VC investment, navigating the due diligence and negotiation process can be daunting. We provide as-needed support and a valuable objective perspective in due diligence preparation and term sheet negotiation.