With most startups in crisis mode, one of the top considerations is cash management. The ability to raise capital has been greatly diminished and things are likely to get more challenging before they get better.
Steve Blank has an excellent post from Jeff Epstein titled Action Today for CFOs with recommendations like:
- Evaluate your when you run out of cash in a worst-case scenario
- If you don’t have 24 months worth of cash, consider the following:
- Draw down your lines of credit and view the interest payments on them as buying insurance
- Sort all vendors by how much you spend and call each asking for a discount or loan to spread out payments further into the future
- Cut marketing programs that don’t have a demonstrable ROI
- Implement a hiring freeze
- Let people go
- Cut all salaries by a certain percentage
- Tightly monitor collections and mitigate problems
Some more cash saving ideas:
- Eliminate all discretionary expenses (require any purchases over X to go through the CFO or CEO)
- Remove any subcontractors or consultants
- Determine which vendors you much have and which ones are nice-to-haves
- Suspend the 401 (k) match
- Ask employees to take unpaid time off, convert to part-time, or a leave of absence
Entrepreneurs are generally optimistic, glass-half-full people, and now is one of the most challenging economic climates we’ll see.
Cash is always critical, especially so in a crisis.
The number one reason startups die is that they run out of cash.
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David Cummings, Khareem Sudlow
