We’re delighted to have Kevin join us to discuss his journey, insights, and Consilience Ventures.
As a former Head of Ecosystem of Microsoft ScaleUp Europe, Kevin has been at the sharp end of the start-up world for many years.
Listen below or head over to Spotify or Apple.
We’re delighted to be joined by Alex for our 10th episode of Nothing Ventured. Alex has an amazing amount of experience across investments, as a founder and VC. With a few memorable war stories to boot.
We hope you enjoy listening!
Listen below or head over to Spotify or Apple.
Guenther is the kind of person we love to talk to on Nothing Ventured. As Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Omnipresent he’s helping organisations around the world simplify the complexity of onboarding and managing a remote workforce. He also used to be in the Special Forces so he’s got a few stories to tell!
Join our host and Founder Aarish Shah as he delves into what makes Guenther tick, advice he has for other founders and what the future of work will look like.
Listen below or head over to Spotify or Apple.
Yana joined us to talk early-stage investing, her work as a Tech Nation ambassador and a whole lot more.
This episode is definitely one for any founders out there starting on a fund raising journey.
Listen below or head over to Spotify or Apple.
If you’ve been following our webinars you’ll know we have a reputation for great guests like Hussein Kanji from Hoxton Ventures. But, due to popular demand, we’ve decided to flip into a podcast. Nothing Ventured will feature everything you’re familiar with, a must for founders looking to scale, learn what makes investors tick, and a big slice of start-up realism.
The first episode of Nothing Ventured will be available soon, featuring Tara Reddy of Loveshark (Catch Tara on Twitter). Tara shares her insights into gaming, raising investment, and more. It’s a great listen.
As ever, Nothing Ventured will be hosted by our very own Start-Up CFO expert Aarish Shah. As Founder of EmeregONE Aarish still spends most of his time at the coalface working directly with growth companies helping them build great finance stacks to fuel growth, raise money and provide the kind of strategic advice founders need.
Catch-up with our most recent webinar where EmergeONE’s start-up CFO expert Aarish Shah talks with CEO of travel insurance start-up battleface, Sasha Gainullin.
Given their recent $12M raise and meteoric growth it was a great opportunity for Aarish to quiz Sahsa on how they’ve done it with some great insights into how battleface has raised money, their approach to finding investors that fit, and how they’ve handled the growth in their business.
A bit about Sasha
With over 20 years of experience in the travel insurance industry, Sasha knows how to deliver on customer needs in emergency travel, medical assistance, emergency evacuation, and claims management. Sasha combines this experience with a team-based approach to find innovative tech solutions for adventure-seekers, independent journalists, humanitarians, and more for today’s modern travelers.
Before battleface, he worked for AIG Travel Guard and the Tangiers Group, where he focused on customer service while developing new products and managing international medical, logistics, and travel assistance operations. Corporate social responsibility is important to Sasha. At Travel Guard, he helped build Nyumbani Village, a self-sustaining community in Kenya for AIDS-affected orphan children and elders. At Tangiers, Sasha supported MOAS, an organisation dedicated to providing search and rescue services, aid, and emergency medical relief to refugees and migrants around the world. Sasha grew up in Russia, studied at the University of Wisconsin, traveled the world, and now is based outside of Washington, D.C. along with his young family.
A good business model remains essential to every successful organization, whether it’s a new venture or an established player.
We don’t normally start with a quote, but we liked this one, and it perfectly encapsulates this article.
The key point here is the word “good” we take that to mean robust, dare we say accurate. Many a business model has been created to add credence to a half-baked idea, sadly numbers and assumptions can be manipulated in many ways.
Particularly at the start-up phase, it’s important to be able to stress-test the levers of your business to model scenarios and future outcomes. This relies on some assumptions but provides a projection of what will happen at some future point. In short, it’s a prediction. It helps you understand if what you’re doing meets your goals, normally for a business, is growth, profit, or simply not going bust.
It’s also a vital tool for raising money. Admittedly at the earliest stage, most investors aren’t looking at your numbers beyond scrutinising your assumptions, they’re investing into you, your team, and your idea. That changes as things get more serious, however.
Mistakes in business models can range from the simple, excluding a tax for example to the complex, failure to think through and plan before starting to create the model.
The common mistakes our team of start-up CFOs encounter is:
Not taking into account the users, applications, and scope of the model.
The basic components of any model – assumptions, calculations, outputs. Failure to do this results in the lack of a reliable and consistent architecture.
An informed model is good, but too many assumptions, forecasts far into the future make your decisions less realistic. Read fanciful!
Creating a business model isn’t an exercise in showing off excel skills. It’s also one of the main areas where mistakes are made. It might be the difference between funding or not.
Whilst there are commonalities in business models, businesses are or at least strive to be, unique. Assuming a cookie-cutter approach is good enough when the model could be the reason behind an investment yes or no seems unduly risky. Read crazy!
Suffice to say our team has seen the good the bad and the ugly when it comes to business model creation. As seasoned financial professionals working with growth companies, they’re great at spotting unrealistic assumptions and creating robust business models that do the job intended.
Have a go at creating yours, tap us up on social for any tips. Or, if you get really stuck we can help.
Happy building.
Hot on the heals of battleface’s recent $12M funding round EmergeONE’s start-up CFO expert will be in discussion with CEO of travel insurance start-up battleface, Sasha Gainullin.
Given their recent raise and meteoric growth it’s a great opportunity to gain insights into how battleface has achieved success in a very competitive market.
With over 20 years of experience in the travel insurance industry, Sasha knows how to deliver on customer needs in emergency travel, medical assistance, emergency evacuation, and claims management. For today’s modern travellers, Sasha combines this experience with a team-based approach to find innovative tech solutions for adventure-seekers, independent journalists, humanitarians, and more.
Prior to battleface, he worked for AIG Travel Guard and the Tangiers Group, where he focused on customer service while developing new products and managing international medical, logistics, and travel assistance operations. Corporate social responsibility is important to Sasha. At Travel Guard, he helped build Nyumbani Village, a self-sustaining community in Kenya for AIDS-affected orphan children and elders. At Tangiers, Sasha supported MOAS, an organisation dedicated to providing search and rescue services, aid, and emergency medical relief to refugees and migrants around the world. Sasha grew up in Russia, studied at the University of Wisconsin, travelled the world, and now is based outside of Washington, D.C. along with his young family.
The latest webinar from EmergeONE is a must-watch for founders looking to understand more about the world of venture capital. Start-up CFO expert Aarish is joined by VC extraordinaire Hussein Kanji. Hussein’s CV reads like a who’s who of UK start-up success. But, it didn’t start there, he tells us about his career journey, where it all started, and how this has helped shape who he is today.
Aarish and Hussein talk about the state of EU venture, how it stacks up against the US, and the major differences. he shares his insights into when to get into venture and more in a must-watch.
May has been one of those months, the news at EmergeONE just kept on coming. In this month’s roundup, we’ll look back at what’s been going on including new hires, our biggest webinar to date (and it’s not even happened yet). client growth and some stellar news on the closure of our own seed round for Projected our latest tech project.
May welcomed both Laura Hine, as part of our marketing team, and Sabine Ficek to our roster of CFOs.
Sabine brings a wealth of experience as a former Finance Director at MSC Cruises and latterly working with a host of start-ups and growth companies in CFO and senior Director roles.
Laura joins as part of our fractional marketing team. Yes, it works for us too! Laura brings immense experience from companies like Nesta, The British Council, and her time working as a spy for the Home Office.
Did we mention we have a webinar coming up on June the 9th, 12 pm BST? If you’ve not seen it, definitely head over to Linkedin in here and be sure to follow EmergeONE.
Hussein, in his role as partner at Hoxton Ventures, has been a part of some of the biggest UK start-up success stories of the last 10 years with two IPOs and a SPAC under their belts in the space of 3 months, if there’s one VC in the UK you want to hear from it’s Hussein. And he’s a thoroughly nice chap to boot.
The webinar is already looking super busy so we’ve dedicated an extended period of time for Q&A where you’ll be able to field questions directly to Hussein. This kind of thing doesn’t happen very often, don’t pass up the opportunity.
Details and sign-up here.
May has been another bumper month for new clients. Our model of fractional CFOs is going from strength to strength as ventures recognise the value experienced CFOs can bring even on a part-time basis. We also got the chance to grow the numerical nous of some of the UK’s next generation of amazing founders when we delivered the finance cycle to the Centre for Entrepreneurs NEF+ cohort of 2021.
We took them through all the things they need to know about finance and how it impacts their business without worrying about debits, credits, and t-accounts (if you know, you know!)This incredible group of 29 entrepreneurs finished off the cycle by delivering some incredible presentations of what they’d learned throughout, with a focus on the financial model of their business.
May saw the completion of our seed round for Projected.ai. Projected is our strategic analysis and forecasting tool, giving founders the information they need to make the right decision and keep their ventures on the path to success.
We’re currently welcoming users to sign-up for our Beta, which you can do here.
Right, back to building!
