Category: News

EmergeONE – A New Beginning (for the finance function that is).

I’m really excited to launch our rebranded site today, it’s the culmination of several years of thinking and learning about the good, the bad and the ugly in early stage finance.

These learnings have come from working with some astounding founders, technologists and operators in amazing ventures solving some incredibly difficult problems. When you’re operating at the coal face with limited resources and multiple opportunities, if your finance function isn’t fit for purpose, you’re going to end up with sub-optimal decisions (or worse, no decision at all).

We’ve learned through talking to angels, venture capitalists and the people in the broader investment landscape about how information flows (or should flow) up and down so that they can better understand what’s going on in their portfolio and help anticipate issues before they blow up.

And not least, we’ve learned by talking to and working with some of the most impressive people working in finance across the early stage ecosystem. Be they the CFOs and more operational finance heads like those working with EmergeONE, or the network of R&D, tax or legal specialists, financial institutions, lenders and software providers that we have built and worked with over time.

Never has it been easier to start a business. The world is full of budding entrepreneurs following their passion and taking a leap of faith to launch their dreams.

But time and time again we see that rather than facilitating and driving that growth, the finance function has at best been considered a necessary evil, or at worst actually been an impediment to scaling.

All too often we’d see founders running their own numbers through some cloud based software and not getting any value out of them, junior finance heads being called CFOs and dropping the ball, or someone heavy hitting out of banking or practice coming in but not willing or able to get their hands dirty because they’d never operated before.

We’re not an outsourced accounting firm whose main goal is to make sure your returns are done on time, and we’re not traditional consultants that come in, charge you a bunch of money for a plan and then wash our hands of the implementation.

Instead, what we are is a group of finance pros that get startups because we’ve been operating in them collectively for decades. We know which metrics matter, from LTV to ARPU from MRR to margin, we know our way around financial models and decks, how to maximise runway or ramp up revenue and know our cashflow from our cap table. Our focus is forward and outwards – we look at the levers that drive your venture, build your finance stack and help you make the best decisions to grow.

In fact, that’s the overriding goal here at EmergeONE, to help grow – whether that’s growing a venture, your understanding of finance, or the ecosystem at large.

How can we help you grow?

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.

EmergeONE’s take on the July 8th treasury announcement.

So another set of world beating or at least world leading announcements were outlined by the Chancellor Rishi Sunak today.

We’re not going to waste your time detailing the intricacies of each package or intervention, because quite frankly you can find those pretty much anywhere else.

We’d much rather give you our thoughts on what it means for startup’s finance and whether there’s any real value in paying attention to what’s been announced, or if you should simply get on with the already tough job of building your venture.

Before we get started, it’s worth noting that we don’t have all the detail yet, and until we do, it’s hard to understand exactly how this will all play out, but based on what we know, this is what we think.

Eat more cake (as long as it’s hot)

Let’s start with the targeted assistance to the hospitality sector.

The cut in VAT for food, accommodation and attractions from 20% to 5% may help anyone building a product or servicing a market that directly benefits from this cut which is set to last through till next January; however one must ask whether the industry is struggling from a ‘folk don’t want to spend’ problem or a ‘folk don’t want to put themselves at risk of catching the virus’ problem.

This goes for the ‘eat out to help out’ plan which offers punters a 50% discount up to £10 if they dine out between Monday and Wednesday during August.

My bet is that these will have an impact, but not as significant as the government might hope.

There is a secondary consideration that the good folk in the Treasury may not have considered too deeply which is the operational cost to businesses of having to implement a change in VAT only to have to flick it back in 6 months time and incur additional costs then.

Certainly for anyone exposed to the food, travel and hospitality sectors, it’s going to be a tough road ahead so any assistance is better than none at all.

Please don’t go

Rishi has made it clear that the Jobs Retention (furlough) Scheme has to end as planned. The government doesn’t want to subsidise jobs that aren’t going to exist, and equally believes that if someone’s been furloughed, they’ll have been sitting idle and losing their skills (rather than say, enrolling in a course or learning something new).

If you’ve furloughed someone and bring them back, then the government will give your business £1,000 as a grant.

The reality is that for most early stage ventures, the choice to bring back someone from furlough is not going to be swung on the back of a grand.

They’ll be brought back if the role is viable and makes sense strategically, the money is just a bonus.

Give a man a fish

The Kickstart scheme has been targeted at job creation for 16 – 24 year olds who are entering employment.

Effectively, the government will pay their wages plus some administration costs for six months.

Let me reiterate, the government will pay for folk to work for you for 6 months.

This could be a really amazing way for startups to access talent whilst training up the next generation of entrepreneurs and I think out of all the announcements, is probably the most impactful for startups if (and it’s a big if) the details don’t derail it.

For example, to qualify, the new hire has to be on universal credit and at risk of long-term unemployment and the roles created have to be new. That could be challenging for startups where many of the roles required are aimed at knowledge worker who are traditionally less likely to suffer from long term unemployment.

Like I say, it’s all in the detail but we think this could be really positive.

In a similar vein, they’ve announced bonuses for employers who hire trainees and apprentices. Now both traineeships and apprenticeships have a pretty specific meaning and again, the sort of roles that are available in cash conscious startups may mean that the additional money doesn’t move the dial enough to warrant the management overhead it would take to run a scheme.

Props on property

The Chancellor announced a few other things most of which probably won’t have a huge direct impact on the growth ecosystem, but there were two that caught my eye.

The first is the withdrawal of stamp duty on properties worth up to £500K in England and Northern Ireland till the end of March 2021.

Obviously that should help boost the property sector which had seen transactions stalling during coronavirus. For any proptech ventures out there this may drive a bit of volume for the next 8 or 9 months.

And finally, the Geen Homes Grant which will see households able to access two thirds of the cost of putting in energy saving measures into their homes up to a max of £5,000.

Again, for any clean or green energy ventures out there, this should see a bit of a boost too.

So there you have it, our take on the recent announcements and the real value to ventures here in the UK.

Overall we think there are some positives, but a bit like the CBILS scheme, are sceptical about how easy it’ll be for ventures to actually take advantage of what’s on the table.

At the risk of repeating ourselves, the devil, is always in the detail.

Talk to us about how we can redefine your finance stack.

Learn More

An update from the team at EmergeONE

[siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Headline_Widget”]

The last few months seem to have flown by, which is kind of weird given most of the country has been reduced to a snail’s pace.

When was the last time you opened a mail or read a post that didn’t start with ‘we are living in unprecedented times’? Well to say that we are is somewhat of an understatement so we’ll go with that too. But, despite the turmoil that surrounds us as founders, finance professionals and business owners we’ve still had to ensure we keep the cogs turning. This is true, not just of the amazing companies we work with, but also at EmergeONE. Luckily we know a thing or two about managing the finances and we’ve been quick to establish a position of knowledge on the various schemes that have been launched and most importantly tapping into the resources designed to keep businesses afloat.

Helping businesses during Covid lockdown

How different the business landscape looked at the start of March? With alarming speed the country was plunged into lockdown and the government was scrambling to avoid large scale economic meltdown. If you believe some reports, without the Bank of England stepping in the government would have faced bankruptcy by the end of March. Regardless, these macro forces seemed to have little relevance to our growing community of growth companies. At their most basic level their priority was to stay alive, extend runway and keep building; some were lucky in that lockdown had little impact on the day-to-day, most have felt the pinch and it was our role to ensure we mitigated the worst of the challenges to ensure business survival.

EmergeONE took steps early to understand the full scope of the available support; loans, furlough schemes and the Future Fund alongside reaching out to investors to see who was still active and who was on pause. Acting quickly, talking to the British Business Bank as well as lenders directly gave us a head start and meant we were able to work alongside our client companies to swiftly access the resources they would need. It’s not been 100% plain sailing, as our customer base fall squarely into the less traditional business set-up many of whom are prone to falling through the gaps when these kind of programmes are launched. We have, on the whole, been very successful in securing funding for our clients, mainly led by our no nonsense approach to getting things done.

When others zig we zag…

Conventional wisdom would suggest a hiring spree for anyone other than a fruit farm during this lockdown would not be sensible. So that’s exactly what we did. We’ve welcomed a bunch of new hires into the team to fuel the next stage of EmergeONE’s growth.

Victoria Ward – Joins us with years of specialist recruitment experience. Her remit is to head up our business development whilst building our growing team of talent. Victoria will be acting as a bridge between clients building out their finance stack and our roster of amazing finance operators and services.

Ben Dickens – Joins us to lead up the marketing function, responsible for establishing the EmergeONe brand as a leader in it’s field.

Dylan Davies – Joins our community of finance pros as an experienced CFO.

Dan Michel – Joins our community as a senior operational expert.

Both Dylan and Dan are a great example of our finance community. A community built on talent and experience with a fair chunk of roll your sleeves up thrown in. They perfectly represent what EmergeONE is all about, making people like them and the services we offer a reality for growth companies.

Looking forward

It’d be tempting to never look back on the last three months, but that would be to deny some valuable lessons that have been learnt. At EmergeONE we’ve learnt how important continuing to be on top of the knowledge game is, taking time to understand the climate and translating strategy into practical actions. Our community has led this approach, collectively they have 100s of years of experience and this is actively shared amongst all our finance professionals. Knowledge sharing and support has never been more important and as we move through 2020 our goal is to codify this and ensure it remains a core component of our DNA.

But our plans – and our ambitions – don’t stop there. Befitting of a company which is striving to be demonstrably different in a space some would call stuffy, we will be luanching with a new brand, website and all the trimmings over the next few months. Communicating how we work and why it’s perfectly designed for growth companies is everything as we establish ourselves in the U.K and beyond.

Watch this space!

Let’s end this update with the usual salutation of our times – Stay Safe!