Projections

Three questions every founder should be able to answer in under a minute: What if we raise 50% less than we want? What if we double our growth rate? What if we hire 3 more engineers? These are not hypothetical exercises. They come up in board meetings, investor calls, and late-night planning sessions. But answering them usually means opening a dialog, changing a number, saving, waiting for projections to recalculate, and then undoing everything because you were just exploring. Or worse, if you are using a spreadsheet: changing a cell, scanning downstream formulas for breakage, and hoping you did not miss one three tabs over. Most founders skip it. ...

Board meetings happen every quarter. The projections prep shouldn’t consume half your week. But for most founders and CFOs, it does. You open the spreadsheet, realize three months of actual numbers need to be entered, discover that someone’s formula changes broke the summary tab, and spend two days getting the model back to a state where you trust it. Then you duplicate it three times for different scenarios, manually build comparison charts, and paste everything into slides at midnight before the meeting. ...