Nick Telson: Create a financial roadmap

Finance isn't sexy, but without a good financial base you don't really have a company. 

Hi, I'm Nick Telson, and this is my unskippable minute.

When I started DesignMyNight I wasn't necessarily good at business, and actually I couldn't do maths, I wasn't good at Excel.

We knew we wanted to sell DesignMyNight for X amount, to do that we needed X amount of revenue, Y amount of profit, and every month we would track to see if we were on target to hit those figures in four to five years.

You know, we took it really quite close to not having any money left, but because we charted it so carefully we were really quietly confident that we would get profit at the right time and then suddenly the cash in the bank starts to go up.

As you set out, figure out what your end goal is going to be and plan very carefully to that end goal, and that is very chartable. 

I think nowadays you forget that you have words like 'entrepreneur' and 'start-up founder', but actually you're just a businessman, and actually, at the heart of that is setting up a viable business.