Consumer · Series B · 3 months
Built the finance foundation a Series B scale-up needed
Stabilised cash forecasting, reporting and investor updates ahead of a permanent FD hire.
Context
A consumer scale-up post-Series B had outgrown its bookkeeping setup. The founder needed credible numbers for the board and a clear runway view.
Challenge
No 13-week cash forecast, ad-hoc reporting, and growing investor questions on unit economics. Permanent FD search underway but months out.
Approach
- ·Built a 13-week rolling cash forecast with sensitivity scenarios
- ·Designed a board pack focused on contribution, runway and cohort retention
- ·Tightened payment, expense and approval policies
- ·Authored the FD job spec, scorecard and onboarding plan
Outcomes
13 weeks
Forward cash visibility
+4 months
Runway extended via working capital
Day 1
Permanent FD productive on arrival
Handover
Permanent FD inherited a documented operating cadence and a board with clean baselines.
Where the business was when we arrived
The company had closed a £14m Series B six weeks before our engagement began. The founder, a product person by background, had relied on a part-time bookkeeper and an outsourced management accounts service. That had been enough at seed and Series A. It was visibly not enough now.
The first board meeting after the round had not gone well. The lead investor had asked three questions in succession — what is the runway under current burn, what is the contribution margin by channel, and what does cohort retention look like at month six — and none could be answered with confidence on the day. The action items were marked as urgent and a permanent FD search was launched, but a credible candidate would not start for at least four months.
We were brought in to bridge that gap with the explicit brief that we should leave the function in better shape than we found it, and that the permanent FD should be productive on day one rather than spending six weeks excavating.
The first artefact: a 13-week cash forecast that actually worked
We built the cash forecast in the first ten days. It was deliberately simple. Receipts came from the order book and historical conversion patterns by channel. Payments came from a bottom-up build of payroll, supplier commitments, marketing spend and capital commitments. Working capital was modelled explicitly rather than buried in a residual.
Three scenarios were maintained: a base case, a downside that flexed conversion and average order value, and an upside reflecting the planned channel expansion. Each scenario changed exactly one cluster of assumptions at a time, so the conversation in the founder's office was always 'what changes if X' rather than 'why are these two numbers different'.
The forecast was reviewed weekly with the founder for the first month, then handed to the head of operations for ongoing maintenance under our supervision. By week six it had become part of the operating rhythm rather than something the founder had to chase.
Reshaping the board pack
The investor's three questions became the spine of the new board pack: runway, contribution by channel, and cohort retention. Everything else was secondary.
Runway was presented as a single page with the cash position, a thirteen-week forward view, and a clearly-stated set of assumptions. Contribution by channel showed each acquisition channel as a column, with revenue, variable cost, contribution and contribution margin. Cohort retention was a triangle showing month-on-month retention by acquisition month, going back twelve months.
Anything that did not directly answer one of those three questions was relegated to an appendix. The pack went from twenty-eight slides to fourteen pages including appendices, and the second board meeting after the round took ninety minutes instead of three hours.
Working capital was the easy win
The supplier payment policy was 'pay on receipt of invoice'. The customer payment policy was 'thirty days from invoice'. Neither had been deliberately chosen; both had been inherited.
We renegotiated terms with the top twenty suppliers, moving the weighted average from twelve days to thirty-eight days. We tightened the customer collections process, including introducing a single-page weekly aged debt review with named owners. The combined effect freed roughly four months of additional runway without any change to underlying burn.
Working capital is the most under-exploited lever in early-stage companies. Founders are often reluctant to push on supplier terms because they assume the relationship will suffer. In practice, when the conversation is handled professionally and the business is clearly growing, suppliers move terms more readily than founders expect.
Authoring the FD search
The original FD job spec was a list of qualifications. We rewrote it as a six-month scorecard: what would a successful FD have delivered by the end of their second quarter. The scorecard listed nine specific outcomes, each with a measurable check, and ranked them by priority.
The scorecard transformed the search. Recruiters could screen against it. The founder could interview against it. Candidates could see exactly what would be expected of them and self-select. The eventual hire — an FD who had previously scaled a Series C consumer business through to acquisition — told us afterwards that the scorecard was the reason she had taken the call rather than the salary.
We also built her thirty-day onboarding plan: who to meet, what to read, which decisions to defer, which artefacts to inherit and which to redesign. She ran the first board meeting after her arrival and was, in her own words, 'productive from day one rather than archaeological for a month'.
Three-month outcomes
Forward cash visibility moved from 'we think we have about a year' to a thirteen-week rolling view supported by a documented model. Runway was extended by four months through working capital alone. The permanent FD inherited a function with a clean operating cadence, a documented set of assumptions, and a board that had stopped asking the same three questions every meeting.
The founder commented at the end of the engagement that the most valuable thing we had done was not the cash forecast or the board pack but giving him back his evenings. He had spent the previous six months assembling investor updates by hand at midnight. By month three he was reviewing pre-built drafts in twenty minutes.
That is the test of a well-run finance function: it returns the founder's time. Everything else is a means to that end.
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