1 00:00:07,650 --> 00:00:14,580 I want to end up on the classic mistakes, the classic mistakes that entrepreneurs make when doing financial projections. 2 00:00:15,240 --> 00:00:20,160 First, classic mistake on under revenue. Overestimate the speed at which you're going to get revenue. 3 00:00:20,400 --> 00:00:27,930 Often it takes a long time. Sometimes you see that we having this incredibly optimistic revenue growth in year four or five and six. 4 00:00:28,170 --> 00:00:34,860 That doesn't mean anything. You can't build a business on all the revenue coming in for projects unless you have a clear plan of what that is. 5 00:00:35,040 --> 00:00:41,130 If you're a biotech company, that's the way it works. That's fine. But you sort of want to remain realistic over the long horizon. 6 00:00:41,710 --> 00:00:45,950 You often miss costs of generating sales, especially if you are having a sales fall. 7 00:00:45,960 --> 00:00:49,200 Think of all the expenses you're going to have to pay your salesforce. 8 00:00:49,410 --> 00:00:49,770 By the way, 9 00:00:49,770 --> 00:00:57,150 that could be you yourself travelling around the country or doing lots of phone calls and going to fancy dinners just to get that first sale. 10 00:00:57,540 --> 00:01:04,839 Don't forget the cost of generating the sale and and then distinguishing between listed and actual prices because often the list, 11 00:01:04,840 --> 00:01:08,280 the price is not the one that you're going to get on the cost side. 12 00:01:08,310 --> 00:01:11,220 Classic mistakes. We forget the cost of running the business. 13 00:01:11,610 --> 00:01:17,460 We think that all our assets are utilised that capacity right at the start when in fact they're not. 14 00:01:17,940 --> 00:01:23,309 And often we get the labour costs wrong, especially forgetting all the benefits and training costs and bonuses. 15 00:01:23,310 --> 00:01:27,960 So these are these are classic mistakes that I see people making on the cash flow side. 16 00:01:29,300 --> 00:01:35,280 And I briefly touched on it, but it really is important. People underestimate how much work it is to get paid. 17 00:01:35,610 --> 00:01:40,410 That's to say, most of the time, say you're doing a contract business, you think you've done the work. 18 00:01:40,650 --> 00:01:45,000 It still takes a month or two or three to chase down to get the bill paid. 19 00:01:45,180 --> 00:01:49,860 You need to work that out into your cash flow statements. That is part of your financial projections. 20 00:01:50,100 --> 00:01:57,390 The timing of cash flows underestimate the true cost of trade carried and and then underestimated the days of fundraising. 21 00:01:57,630 --> 00:02:01,500 You don't want to start fundraising two months before you're running out of cash. 22 00:02:01,530 --> 00:02:03,840 You want to do that 6 to 12 months before that.