Applies To All Business Models

Sometimes the ideal distribution path looks different than the entrepreneur intended when they started the business. The brands that survive today's marketplace will be making decisions about distribution and channels of delivery with customer expectations and preferences at center stage.

Open book management is sharing the company's finances and key financial drivers openly with managers to increase their buy-in and understanding of the company's performance. By sharing company finances and expecting financial literacy of managers, open-book management allows multiple leaders to use the same language and work towards the same goal.

The more you have the ability to analyze what went right or wrong, the more useful your financial model and plan are to making business decisions. Being able to have both an accurate history and a record of making realistic projections that were met can give entrepreneurs credibility with lenders, investors and the business' board of directors.

Food entrepreneurs themselves often feel changed when taking outside investor capital. They feel the weight of the responsibility of paying back those investors with a return. They often work even harder than they were before because others are sharing the risk with them and are emotionally invested in their business as well.

Behind every great food entrepreneur is a great financial team, whether that team is employed by the business directly or through an outsourcing method. Building that team helps the entrepreneur, management and board make informed decisions and allows the business' key stakeholders to focus on growing their customer base and strengthening their brand.

From the entrepreneur's perspective, the most important thing when using an accounting package is to ensure accurate setup and data entry so that they are able to produce accurate financial statements. While entrepreneurs need to understand their financial statements and financial drivers, they can often outsource some accounting work.

Much of the difficult part of raising money is putting together the requested documentation for lenders and investors. This includes everything from tax documents to sell sheets to simulated proforma financial statements with realistic assumptions about the company's growth.

Company valuations should be done based on a rational justification of the future growth rate and future earnings of the company, as well as the fundamentals of the business model. For example, whether the company is defensibly unique and how long its competitive advantage can be sustained are both key drivers of company value.

Food entrepreneurs will always have lots of goals competing for their attention. Good entrepreneurs know how to prioritize goals and optimize their efforts for the goals they are pursuing as priorities. This allows them to build financially successful companies and, over time, pursue many more big, hairy, audacious goals than they would have otherwise.

The focus of the narrative request for funding is to substantiatehow much of what kind of money the company needs and for what purpose. This should be done after other documentation and should be relatively brief to make it easy for lenders/investors to read. It should supplement other materials present in the financial package, like the pitch deck.