It’s late on a Friday afternoon in the summertime, and, as the CEO of a hot startup, you should be feeling pretty good.  The key metrics on your monthly dashboard are all glowingly positive.  Well known investors call every week wanting to invest in your next round.  And yet you are nervous.  All of things that used to be easy to do in your business are getting harder, and you don’t know why.   The answer is simple: You’re not running a startup. You’re running a Scaleup Company.

Most companies view business planning as a necessary evil.  Senior executives would rather be building new technology or talking to customers.  For early and growth stage companies, the goal of business planning is to obtain funding to start or expand the business.  For more mature companies, the main goal is usually to drive either an acquisition by a larger player or faster growth and profitability.  In reality, the major goal of business planning is to outline the structure and execution steps to create the best possible business. 

High tech CEOs face a “One Trick Pony” dilemma.  After all, birthing that first product was incredibly difficult, and the customer response has been great.  Your company is making enough money to stay in business, so why wouldn’t your company just do more of the same?  Because becoming a one trick pony can happen overnight, and the impact can be catastrophic.  

Thankfully, entrepreneurs are optimistic creatures.  Most launch their companies on a wing and a prayer and then work with their radically under resourced teams to create their first product and gain initial customers. Sometimes, things go smoothly.  Funding comes in, customers sign up, and product reviews come back positive.  A majority of the time, however, young companies struggle and ultimately don't survive to fight another day. In fact, most start-ups hang on longer than they should, because, as I said before, entrepreneurs are optimists.  They glom on to any shred of evidence that might indicate that they could be successful and ignore or minimize the rest.

On the surface, the job of the Board of Directors appears to be pretty simple.  The Board debates and approves the company strategy.  It uses full Board meetings, committee meetings related to finance and operations, and monthly reports from management to track things over time.  This system works well for many companies; however, if you are a growth company CEO, you should ask yourself one, key question:  Are my outside Board Members paying attention?

For entrepreneurs, first meetings with investors really are make-or-break events. By building and delivering a high quality Investor Presentation, you can pave the way for a successful first meeting and an on-going dialog with investors about funding your company. In this post, I’ll show you how to build a winning investor pitch.  In Part 2, I’ll lay out the secrets to delivering your pitch – successfully – in person – to people with funds to invest.

Of all the investor documents, the Executive Summary provides you with the most freedom to create a winning story.  It’s only 1 to 10+ pages long, so why is it so flexible?  Because it can be built in short, medium, or long form; you can vary the content and order of the information more than in other documents, and you can concentrate almost entirely on the story rather than the mechanics of how you are going to get things done.  In short, it’s your story – distilled and tasty.

First of all, there is no magic formula for valuation.  It's a negotiation based on the characteristics of your market, your company's performance, and the quality of your team. Secondly, not all money is the same.  Your company's valuation matters, but it's not the only thing that matters when you look to raise money.  The quality of the funding source matters, too.