An e-book exploring the differences between private equity and venture capital along with steps VC-backed firms can take to be funding ready at all times.

Most start-up businesses need capital in order to grow

Capital comes in two main forms: debt and equity. Debt is money that’s borrowed from a lender or raised from a bond issuance that must be repaid with interest. Meanwhile, there are two different kinds of equity: private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC).

PE and VC investors have different objectives. Private equity investors want to invest in businesses that are profitable, while venture capital investors want to invest in businesses that are going to grow. There’s a big difference between the two.

“But doesn’t every business want to be profitable?” you might be thinking? Yes, but profitability isn’t always the main objective, especially during the early stages of a startup company.

Technology giants like Amazon and Google are good examples of companies that operated at a loss for years so they could invest all of their cash back into the business in order to grow.

These companies and their investors were taking the long view: They weren’t worried about becoming profitable right out of the gate. Instead,they wanted to grow as much and as fast as possible so they could eventually dominate their industries. They knew that if they could become the dominant online retailer and search engine, profits would soon follow. Of course, this strategy worked well for both of them.

Also, market capitalization — which is a main focus for VC investors — is calculated as a multiple of revenue, not earnings. So, the faster a company grows, the higher its sales and market cap will be.

Stages of Venture Capital Financing

Venture capital is usually raised in stages because successful growth companies always need more money to keep growing. Think of it like pouring gasoline on a fire: The more capital a business has, the more salespeople it can hire and the more it can invest in technology, research and development, and new product development to spur growth.

The first stage is called the pre-seed stage

Here, there may not even be a real business yet — it might just still be an idea or concept in an entrepreneur’s mind. Funding at this stage usually comes mainly from family and friends or out of an entrepreneur’s own pocket, not from venture capital investors.

The next stage, or the seed stage, is the first stage where venture capitalists might cet involved. There still might not be a lot of revenue but there’s strong evidence that the seeds of a successful business

have been planted. Real (not prototype) products and services are being delivered to the marketplace and a management team is in place that’s capable of executing the business plan.

The next stage of funding is called Series A

At this stage, VC investors want to see a real, Operating business with repeatable sales and marketing processes that can acquire customers on a consistent basis. The business should be utilizing financial modeling and long-range planning and have adequate internal controls, along with a fundraising project plan and investor presentation.

Series B, Series C and so forth

The subsequent funding stages after Series are called B, C, Venture capital investors will have specific expectations at each funding stage.

Consero’s Finance as a Service(FaaS) is a comprehensive and fully-managed back office solution that blends leading financial technology and a skilled finance & accounting team designed specifically to help investment managers run their business efficiently and profitably.

This eBook explores the top five ways FaaS enables investment managers like you can overcome common challenges and accelerate your time to value.

Whether you’re growing your investment management business, launching a new fund, or launching your first fund, increasing your clients’ wealth is your passion. Your investors are the lifeblood of your business, and you know how to nurture those relationships. When you can focus on your clients and their financial success, your firm can also be successful.

But running a business is more complicated and time-consuming than you expected. From human resources to accounting tasks to compliance and security risks, it’s easy to get bogged down with managing the day-to-day instead of being able to focus on what you are best at—managing client investments.

The good news is you can streamline the entire back office of your investment management firm and scale on demand, effortlessly. Consero’s Finance as a Service (FaaS) is a comprehensive solution that blends leading financial technologies and expert advisory services designed specifically to help investment managers run their businesses efficiently and profitably.

Keep reading to learn how FaaS helps you:

1.Take the Stress Out of Financial Management

2.Leverage Industry Experts to Support Your Unique Operations

3.Ensure Best Practices for Human Resources

4.Minimize Risk While Boosting Control and Transparency

5.Scale Your Business on Demand

Alternative Asset Managers face a pressing dilemma. Their focus is rightly on managing their investments and relationships with investors, but they still need to fulfill their duties and responsibilities for their own management company. And if such duties are postponed or under-managed, the fallout, from regulators and investors alike, can jeopardize the success of the entire firm.

This article examines how Investment Managers can tackle the finance function for their own management company, with a focus on the burdens and benefits of the various options. Many Managers begin using some in-house solution, eventually migrating to rely on an outside firm or adding it to the lists of duties for a fund administrator. But a third option is growing in popularity: outsourcing the finance function, by using a “Finance as a Service” model.

For any investment managers about to launch a fund, or who are relatively nascent in their evolution, the clock is ticking. The right choice for serving the finance function of the management company can mean the difference between establishing best practices early, the kind that allows the finance function to stay nimble and responsive for the life of the firm or facing the consequences of bad habits. Habits that began when the Firm chose the easiest solution, rather than one that truly suited their needs.

Private Equity firms need the Finance & Accounting team to deliver clear insights quickly. But too often, they are re-creating the wheel—implementing software, hiring professionals and building reports. Time is wasted and opportunities are missed.

To be successful, the finance & accounting function of Private Equity portfolio companies should create value. A strategic CFO should provide the “Voice of Finance” that permeates throughout the business. Key functions like processing transactions, closing the books and producing internal/external reporting should all be efficient. And those efficiencies should drive the relative cost of the finance & accounting function down as the organization scales up.

In this eBook, we’ll explain the common mistakes to help you identify potential failure points. We’ll provide insights into how they can be resolved so you can begin getting more value out of the finance function. And we’ll show you how the finance function can provide the foundation to build for the future and guide the business strategically.

 Five Common Mistakes:

• Misaligned skill sets in finance & accounting
• Re-creating the finance & accounting wheel
• Disconnected finance & accounting systems
• Processes that won’t scale
• Buried information

 The Fix:Driving efficiencies through automation and AI with Finance as a Service

For those Private Equity (PE) firms employing a rollup strategy, it’s critically important to develop a systematic, repeatable process to onboard acquisitions quickly and get a clear understanding of the true financial and operational status of the business.

Contents

• Why PE firms are embracing the rollup strategy
• The critical role of finance and accounting
• Common challenges of the rollup strategy
• What you need: The four building blocks of a rollup F&A platform
  1. Integrated and extensible best-of-breed software stack
  2. Experienced F&A personnel with a range of skillsets
  3. Robust statutory and management reporting
  4. Centralization, standardization and automation
• Consero’s Rollup Platform for PE Firms

For a growing number of PE firms, the “rollup platform” provides the foundation for financial reporting and operational standards to improve visibility and accelerate acquisition returns.

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In this eBook, we’ll explain how PE firms like yours are using rollup platforms to apply systematic processes to financial and operational functions. Aligning the people, processes and technology of acquisitions in less than two months—instead of a year or more—PE firms can scale the business quickly to achieve growth targets.
Read on to find out how you can bring visibility to hidden costs, inefficient processes and unnoticed opportunity to realize the returns on investment faster.

Why PE Firms are embracing the rollup

Bain’s 2019 Private Equity Report found that nearly 30% of PE firms are employing a rollup strategy. The rollup, where multiple small companies are acquired and merged, allows PE firms to build economies of scale through a single brand supported by shared sales, marketing and operations. To grow the business effectively, the administrative infrastructure and reporting systems should be standardized across the acquired operations. The ultimate value of the business is created through a much larger entity that will produce higher profits and command a higher valuation multiple upon exit.

Over the course of the last decade, there has been an explosion of choices in financial management software—from full function suites to industry-specific apps. The software has matured with data management, reporting and functionality to deliver huge productivity gains to finance departments. Yet organizations still flounder with lack of insight and cumbersome business processes.

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The organizations realizing the most value from software understand the need to align applications with the organization’s unique objectives and requirements. They know what questions to ask to build the insights that will drive decisions.

In this eBook, we’ll share the secrets of those CFOs who are maximizing the value of software and AI. They are adding value to their organizations by understanding requirements and leveraging software to simplify—streamlining processes and delivering clear, concise insight

How can Finance as a Service give you higher velocity with lower costs and effort than building in-house?

Growing companies face a critical decision as they reach a certain size and scale of operations: Is it better to outsource accounting or keep it in-house? At first look, each option seems to have a number of benefits.

UNDERSTANDING THE COSTS AND ROI OF TRADITIONAL ACCOUNTING
Finance as a Service is a major departure from the traditional method of handling accounting. This new, more effective method for handling a core business need can lead to significant improvements, but can also be difficult to grasp at first
in comparison to traditional accounting. First, let’s consider the costs of traditional accounting. This will help organizations better understand the unique value proposition offered by outsourced accounting through a direct comparison to in-house.

TRADITIONAL ACCOUNTING COSTS
One of the most important considerations to make at a high level, beyond the specific and often high costs of traditional accounting, is its variable nature. Organizations that handle such efforts in-house have to repeatedly address some uncertainties
related to staffing, software and equipment over time that increase the amount of labor and funds spent on accounting. While these circumstances play out differently for all enterprises, they represent a notable, sometimes substantial cost that simply is not present in outsourced accounting.

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Strategic finance has become the secret accelerator of high-growth companies where bets are bigger, risks are higher and the outcomes from decisions have lasting impact. But for most growing companies, finance and accounting can’t deliver the clear insight into business performance that leaders need. The wrong people, inefficient processes and outdated systems obstruct progress and stall growth.

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To respond to rapid changes, you need a clear view into financial fundamentals, forward-looking reporting and an experienced perspective of business performance metrics. While outsourced accounting simply allows you to offload non-core business activity such as AP, AR and basic reporting, Finance as a Service delivers integrated best-in-class technology as a platform, business process engineers, data analysis expertise and high- level strategic CFO guidance.

Traditional financial management options for startups and high growth companies Full of tradeoffs and uncertainties, it’s challenging to find the right solution to manage the financial needs of your business.

• DO IT MYSELF “I don’t know how or have the time.”
• HIRE A CFO “Too expensive.”
• HIRE A CONTROLLER “Not ready for that kind of investment.”
• HIRE A FRACTIONAL CFO “What if they don’t understand my business.”
• CHOOSE AN OUTSOURCER “I know someone who had a bad experience.”

Read on to see how you can rethink your finance and accounting solution. There is a better way.

Financial fundamentals that connect the dots

For growing companies, it makes sense to use software designed for small business—one for
accounting, another for travel and entertainment and another for invoicing. The data is not
connected and there are multiple entry points, but it works as a short-term solution.

A more complete picture

As the company evolves, you need to be able to see the interactions and dependencies of all parts of the business. Building spreadsheets with data from multiple systems wastes time and doesn’t provide deep insight. You need to be able to see your business as a whole—past, present and future.

“We need to sync with marketing to provide real-time analysis of how marketing efforts correlate to sales/dollars received.” Consero customer

Insight through connected data

With financial information collected from across the business, presented in a unified form, you can make sense of the current challenges and opportunities ahead. Connected data that supports financial reporting will help you:

• Understand your cash position, including the pace of collections.
• Monitor customer acquisition costs and track ongoing account profitability.
• Evaluate inventory or service line performance in real time—before it’s too late to act proactively.
• Demonstrate performance gains to potential investors.

With a firm foundation of financial reporting, you can make confident decisions as you navigate the challenges and opportunities of growth.

Processes to increase efficiency, reduce fraud

While paper-based processes and functional apps can support the company in early stages, growth demands higher productivity and controls to reduce the risks of errors and fraud. When employees have to enter data into two or three different systems, they are wasting time that could be spent on profit-building activities.

Grow without growing payroll

With integrated financial management systems, you can reduce repetitive tasks and duplicate data entry. Employees can handle higher transaction volumes in the same amount of time. Consolidated data means that employees don’t have to spend so much time in spreadsheets.

Reduce opportunities for fraud

Without formal financial policies and controls to safeguard and monitor revenue and expenditure transactions, companies are open to lost revenue, over payments or even internal fraud. Moving to a consolidated financial platform and eliminating paper-based processes will improve reporting, expedite collections and reduce the opportunities for fraud.

Controls and accuracy

With integrated financial management systems and processes, your employees can focus on productive work instead of administrative tasks. Connected systems will support key checkpoints, critical performance metrics and segregation of duties to reduce unintended errors and employees who might consider taking advantage of unchecked processes.

70% of staff members surveyed felt their company would benefit from reducing the amount of time spent on administrative tasks. CFO study

Clear line-of-sight to drive decisions

When business leaders have to depend on information housed in multiple disconnected financial management systems, there is no single view of meaningful information to make decisions. Too many decisions are made on gut feelings because there simply isn’t enough time to piece together all the needed data.

“We need to focus ourselves much more on getting our product right and growing our customer base.” Consero customer

Focus on the future

As your company grows, you must have financial information that gives you a birds-eye view of the performance of the organization—as well as the ability to focus in on the details. You need to understand exactly what is happening across your business so you can make the best decisions for the future.

Execute with confidence

With strong financial management guidance, you can monitor and guide the strategic direction of the company. Accurate financial models and visualizations give the leadership team and managers the information they need to:

• Recognize strategic missteps early and take corrective action.
• Provide visibility into recurring revenue and other cash inflows to monitor profitability.
• Identify vendors missing deadlines or simple mistakes by staff members.
• Track forecasts and budgets to keep the company on course. With focused financial information, your managers can execute on their mission with confidence.

Reduce distractions to focus forward

It’s difficult to focus on the future when you have to manage the everyday administrative tasks of financial management. Business leaders who are fighting fires—trying to stay ahead of vendors, receivables, taxes and compliance—can’t spend enough time on issues that will impact the long-term success of the organization.

Prioritize growth

The health of any business depends on looking ahead to identify opportunities and be alert for warning signals. When you reduce the everyday distractions, you can spend more time working on strategic partnerships, looking for ways to drive performance and improve visibility for decision makers.

Look to experts

By strategically outsourcing financial and accounting activities, while maintaining a core team in-house, you can take a strategic approach to financial management. The key is to find professionals who have the experience to deliver financial management support with accuracy, wisdom and discretion.

Offload transactional work

By relying on shared services to offload transactional work, your business will be more efficient while increasing visibility to information. The integrated financial management systems delivered through outsourced finance and accounting provide better insight through connected data as well as the reduced burden on your team.

90% of finance executives surveyed say they need to do more with the financial and operations data at hand to help top management make critical decisions. CFO

Insights to enable growth decisions

A fundamental disconnect between the company’s goals and its financial figures are at the heart of many business failures. Without visibility into comprehensive financial information, it’s impossible to accurately monitor performance and measure progress on strategy.

“Outsourced accounting typically doesn’t get ingrained in your business, whereas Finance as a Service adds value to the business as a whole.”

Control risk during change

When you have deeper financial insight— with visibility into data and analysis tools to build understanding—it’s possible to assess risk in different scenarios. With a firm understanding of the financial position of the business, you can work with stakeholders to create opportunities, meet challenges head on and overcome the inevitable obstacles to growth.

Visibility across operations

With connected data and mature financial management guidance, your organization can mitigate risks and build for the future with:

• Cash forecasting built on clear understanding of recurring revenue, receivables and outflows.
• Pricing strategies that reflect fullyburdened costs.
• Reporting to provide each stakeholder the information that builds confidence.
• Identification of financial trends and market opportunities to better control costs and build for the future.

By providing your organization with timely insights into the company’s performance, you can help guide the company to mitigate risk and build a long-term strategy.

Finance as a Service from Consero

At Consero, we combine traditional CFO, controller and bookkeeping services with proven processes and integrated software to give executives a dashboard view of company performance, plus the ability to invoice customers and pay bills all in one place.

Delivering far more value than outsourced accounting, which often just provides glorified bookkeeping with compliance based reporting, Finance as a Service gives clients—like your organization—enterprise-level financial visibility and control at a fraction of the cost and time required to setup and manage an internal finance team and infrastructure. You also get management reporting that tells you how your business is actually performing financially. We can have you up and running in 30 days with minimal impact to your company, delivering real value including:

• Connected Data: No more disparate data; we provide a financial portal with best-of -breed financial, accounting, invoicing and expense software.
• Process and Controls: We implement proven processes and controls to increase efficiency and speed to market.
• Right People: We combine traditional CFO, controller and bookkeeping services with proven processes and integrated software that gives executives a dashboard view of how their company is performing, as well as the ability to invoice customers and pay bills all in one place.
• Saving Time: We free up your top people from dealing with time-consuming financial activities and allow them to focus on strategic goals.
• Financial Visibility: With comprehensive financial reporting, you can make decisions based on a clear picture of your financial standing.
• Poised for Growth: We deliver a new paradigm; a finance department that is an enabler of growth — not a constraint.

Contact us for a complimentary assessment at 866-588-0495 or visit www.conseroglobal.com

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What keeps CFOs up at night? According to a recent survey from The CFO Alliance, most heads of financial operations at businesses all over the world aren’t exactly counting sheep while they toss and turn in bed. Instead, their thoughts turn to time, data and a paradoxical excess and shortage of both, all at once.

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Many executives, managers or anyone with corporate experience can probably relate. This is especially true for small to medium sized business (SMBs) where there are certainly fewer resources to get tasks accomplished — not as many systems, certainly not as many people.

“The biggest thing keeping CFOs up at night is – not surprisingly – ‘too much to do and not enough time to do it,'” according to the CFO Alliance survey.

Having strategic agility is another top concern – which tied very closely to not having the right systems, or the right skills on their finance team. For the strategic CFO, visibility into the right data is invaluable. However, there is more data being generated from more sources. With outdated technologies, inefficient processes and misaligned teams, CFOs are operating at a disadvantage to obtaining quality data. If CFOs aren’t leveraging systems that can deliver timely and accurate information, they can’t pivot effectively. For finance chiefs at many companies, the answers to their most pressing concerns seem just out of reach. If only they had the right tools, processes and people at their disposal to mine their most precious resource. Many feel they could transform the company if they could unlock the code to their black box of concerns.

What it all comes down to is strategy. A CFO’s primary duty is to develop and execute a long-term financial plan for the business. But this plan is really made up of small, short-term tasks that must be delegated and accomplished appropriately. Bridging that gap between long-term strategic thinking and tactical, short-term execution is the crux of the CFO’s daily worries.

Perhaps it always has been this way, but the best business leaders rarely see the status quo as an obstacle. Instead, they are leveraging the best tools available to check off the daily line items while keeping the future constantly in view.

“When you are a brandnew company, you may need a general-ledger accountant and AR and AP expertise, but you may not need them full time. And when cash is dear, and you’ve got a full-time head doing a 50% job, it’s painful. Consero can put a 50% person until you grow.”

BRIDGING THE GAP

In an article for CFO.com, David McCann points out that the size of a company often dictates how their finance departments are organized. What’s peculiar, McCann finds, is the similarities shared by very small and very large companies. Firms logging either less than $5 million or more than $1 billion in annual revenue tend to outsource almost all of their finance and accounting work, at least the most routine, transactional tasks. But between that gap where so many businesses lie, F&A outsourcing has commonly been a rarity.

It is increasingly observed that a company in between the very large and very small are choosing to strategically outsource transactional F&A functions while keeping a core team in-house.

Synergis Education, whose CFO Scott Wenhold spoke with McCann, did just that using Consero Global. Synergis claims around $75 million in annual revenue, hardly a lightweight by any means, but leverages Consero’s shared services model to maintain a lean, in-house F&A staff. This allows CFO Wenhold to work with just three analysts to coordinate strategically, without disregarding the “boring” work that would otherwise consume much of their time.

AGREEING ON CHANGE

This model may be cutting-edge, and executives may indeed be skeptical of committing to such a seismic shift. But recent surveys and studies of F&A professionals – along with the results attained by those who outsource these tasks strategically – prove it is the most logical solution.

Again, picking the brains of the modern CFO is incredibly illuminating on this subject. A survey from Ernst and Young of nearly 800 finance leaders around the world revealed that more than half of CFOs feel stuck in a creative rut. Too much of their time and energy is being spent on transactional tasks, routine bookkeeping and compiling reports, according to the survey. Of course they want to spend more time in a big-picture mindset, and often have highly capable staff and systems at their disposal. Somehow, though, the puzzle pieces don’t fit.

It’s easy to assume that many executives don’t want to change, or at least believe this is the way it should be. After all, the people working for the executives are expected to handle most of the transactional, nose-to-thegrindstone duties, and it would only be fair if the CFO had to shuffle some papers around once in awhile. But another study from CFO.com argues that this organizational hierarchy is outdated and inaccurate. Most non-executive staff, responding to a survey, said they wanted their CFO to be a strategic, visionary leader – a “catalyst” for innovation and change. In reality, staff members said their CFOs instead took on the less-appealing role of “steward” or “administrator.”

We are quick to speculate that executives and associates hold competing views of corporate organization, but this survey posits that this presumption is often false. Seventy percent of staff members surveyed felt their company would benefit from reducing the amount of time spent on administrative tasks, and 81 percent felt automation and technology was the best way to accomplish this goal.

COLLABORATING AND CREATING

At every level of the traditional corporate structure, business goals and the methods to achieve them are surprisingly similar. But until recently, the best way to narrow this unified vision has been elusive for most companies. A shared services model for F&A like the one enabled by Consero is proving to be the best way to enable strategic planning despite limited time and resources.

The difference between good reporting and actionable reporting is seen when CFOs have access to not just a trove of data, but well-organized and visual ways to capture and use that data. The managed services approach to F&A is more than a reporting tool – CFOs can gain access to the information they need to spark the connection between data and insight.

With Consero, that can take many forms:

• Understanding where problems exist.
• Facilitate the right business discussions in problem areas.
• Continuously measure and compare ongoing performance.
• Hold managers accountable for results.
• Understand and compare against typical impacts for similar companies.

The business world is already familiar with cloud services and their ability to connect and organize disparate teams. An outsourced financial partner takes this valueadding approach a step further by centralizing the most common F&A tasks, from transactional work to data visualization and reporting. Working with an outsourced partner gives you get access to best-in-class SaaS technology that is implemented in weeks, not months or years. The heavy lifting is not the burden of your finance team which allows them to stay focused on strategy and driving revenue. In this way, outsourced finance partner connects businesses to the people, processes and technology they need, without requiring CFOs to delegate or micromanage.

With the most time-consuming tasks taken care of, CFOs have more time to spend doing what they signed up for – working with their CEO and F&A teams to understand the data before them and make informed decisions on where to steer the business. That’s a level of insight that enables them to make the best decisions, whether it’s for something a few days or a few years down the road.

Forward-looking CFOs cannot afford to get bogged down in transaction processing. Instead, they should have confidence that the financials and processing are executed correctly. This frees their time to focus on strategic growth of the business.

For more information contact Consero at +1 (866) 588-0495 or find us at www.conseroglobal.com

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