Have your cake and eat it

A few weeks back I found myself sitting among a sea of entrepreneurs at an ‘Exit’ seminar organised by this magazine. Of everything on the agenda, I was most intrigued by a salutary tale being told by a speaker about two successful businessmen and the respective thriving ventures they had built over the course of ten years.

Both men had founded their enterprises with their own cash, had happened upon great business ideas, deployed sound business models and had put in an equal amount of blood, sweat and tears. The difference at the end of the road though was stark. Entrepreneur A was still owner of over 70 per cent of the business prior to selling it. However, Entrepreneur B’s share of his venture prior to exit was a mere two per cent. Or, to put it another way, ‘A’ raked in £14 million, while ‘B’ made a mere £400,000.

The difference in their rewards was down to how they had funded growth. ‘A’ had been fanatical about keeping as much equity as possible, deploying an array of canny practices in the early years and using a variety of more complex financial mechanisms in later years. ‘B’, meanwhile, had issued new shares to venture capital backers (when he hit trading problems) and new shares when he bought other businesses, developed new products or needed capital to move into new markets. In the end, he eventually made more money for his outside investors, venture capitalists and City institutions than he did for himself.

It’s a state of mind
To build your business from scratch without recourse to outside investors requires a tenaciousness and a bloody mindedness that few exhibit. In the early days, when you may only have recourse to personal finances and the operating revenues of the business ‘bootstrapping’ is the order of the day

The main issue here though is that bootstrapping is only likely to get you so far along the growth curve. After you’ve cut costs, outsourced everything non-core, switched suppliers, reduced inefficiencies, and arranged as many marketing and advertising ‘contra deals’ as you can, you need to start being really innovative.

According to Mark Crossfield, a director at Bristol-based M3 Corporate Finance, which raises finance and provides transactional support for growing businesses, many smaller firms fail to secure bank or other funding (which doesn’t involve issuing equity) because they think they lack sufficient collateral with which to obtain a loan.
Says Crossfield, ‘we try to look at various debt options centred round the balance sheet or cash flow for leverage. We like to exhaust every asset route – properties, assets, stock – to get leverage for the business. For instance, you might be able to use future cash flow to drive out unsecured funding, although whether or not
you obtain it will depend on the size of your business.

‘It’s about a state of mind, about thinking creatively,’ he says. ‘For instance, as well as the usual invoice discounting and factoring solutions (cash advanced by finance houses against outstanding sales invoices – see case study below) there is the relatively new option of payroll financing. ‘This is a good contingency way of getting growth and one that is flexible,’ claims Crossfield. However, as it is an unsecured loan to help you meet your payroll costs, you must be over a certain size and the charges may be prohibitive for some.

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