👋🏾 Hi friends!

Hello again from cold but sunny Tuscany 😀 

As promised, this week’s Off Balance is going to be a little (ok, a lot) shorter than normal as I unwind and reflect on the last year as well as plan for the year ahead.

Not that it hasn’t been a pretty busy December all in all, but sometimes you just need to stop being ‘productive’ and start getting strategic in your thinking.

So as you get the turkey in the oven and take that extra glug of wine to deal with your in-laws / sibling / cranky uncle, take a step back and give yourself a pat on the back for everything you’ve managed to get done this year which - at least in startup land - has been a pretty crazy one all in all.

Now let’s get down to business…

In this weeks Off Balance, I’ll be chatting about:

❓️ Planning a strategy as a first time solopreneur
❌ 10 things CFOs see founders doing that they REALLY shouldn’t be

Also, in this week’s Nothing Ventured, I spoke to Matthew Stafford, Co-Founder of 9Others, an offline social club hosting small, intimate dinners where entrepreneurs can - over a good meal and no doubt a bit of liquid courage - ask each other the answers to the questions that have been keeping them up at night.

Matthew also invests in early stage businesses and has a golden rule not to invest if it’s the first time he’s meeting the founder who is pitching.

As always, our Primer episode gives you a bit of background on how he got to where he is today - pheasant beating and all 🦃 

Also, if you have any feedback, or if there’s something you’re desperate to see me include, just reply to this mail or ping me online - I’m very open to conversations.

If you like what I’m putting out, do give me a follow on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

(If you are trying to connect with me on LinkedIn, maybe read this post I wrote and make sure to start your request with “Off Balance” and, more importantly, tell me why you’d like to connect 💪🏾)

Don’t forget to like, rate and subscribe to Nothing Ventured on Apple, Spotify or YouTube, it really helps more people see what we’re doing - you can find links to these (and more including my Office Hours) right here!

Now let’s get into it.

How can did I add value?

This week I decided to try and add some value to someone who’s business has been transformational in my life.

Me.

Yes, I decided to sit myself down and give myself a bit of purposeful direction 😂 

There is an old saying, “physician, heal thyself” that comes from the Bible (Luke 4:23) and is one of those sayings that rings very true to me.

I spend a lot of time helping others out with their businesses or giving advice on their personal situations, but rarely take the time to do the same for myself.

It’s also true that it’s much easier to give advice than to take it, and even easier to second guess one’s own advice.

That’s why having mentors and coaches in your life can be a game changer.

Whilst I have lots of people whose wisdom I am able to draw upon, I’ve always defaulted to reading as a way to ingest the learnings of others - after all, we stand on the shoulders of giants.

At the moment, I am reading The Go To Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders written by Richard Blundell, Paul Watson and Chris Tottman. I have known Chris, founding partner of Notion Capital, for a while, but had my first conversation with Richard only recently with a view to getting the three of them on the pod.

They’ve scaled and exited, failed and restarted multiple times and have really learned what works in the world of B2B SaaS - even if the term didn’t exist when they were doing it.

Now, my business isn’t actually a SaaS business, it’s a services business and as a result, I’ve always found it difficult to really hone in on our value proposition.

After all, the sort of things CFOs do is many and varied (just read all the posts I’ve written on them!)

But whilst I was reading the book, I had a bit of a mini-epiphany…

What if I flipped my thinking.

What if I thought of the business as a software business and our CFOs as a product solving a pain point for our customers.

You may ask why that’s necessary, after all, I could probably come up with a value proposition without going through a contorted thought process. But as I mentioned, service led businesses often get into all sorts of projects, but software solutions (at least the really great software solutions) tend to solve one problem (initially at any rate) incredibly well.

So I started thinking about all the issues that our customers face and what it is that we do to solve them.

That’s everything from managing cash flow and burn, to dealing with investors and financiers, navigating the board, setting up KPIs and metrics, regular reporting, dealing with EMI schemes, R&D claims and a plethora of other things.

And I tried to narrow those down into the essence of what it is that we are solving.

Then I tried to think about our customers - founders - and what intrinsic pain they face that we are there to solve for.

Now let’s face it. Founders face multiple pain points on multiple fronts, but ultimately the one that keeps them up at night (at least in the earlier stages of their business) is whether they can keep the lights on. Do they have enough fuel to keep the furnace burning and, more prosaically, are they going to make payroll this month.

The pain that they have is, simply put, will they have enough cash tomorrow to keep the business running.

So I went through a couple of iterations and then (because I’m that sort of a guy) plonked it on LinkedIn to try and get some feedback.

And here’s what I ended up with after to’ing and fro’ing with helpful folk online as well as my own team:

I’d love to get your thoughts on whether this makes sense, if it speaks to you about something you’ve been or are going through and can relate to viscerally?

I’m going to keep on working on it and narrowing it down further until I have the gotten to the pure essence of what it is we do - watch this space!

As always, my office hours are open, if you’d like to chat about this or anything else, just grab some time 😊.