When & How: Wednesday Feb 17 – Register Now!

Accelerate 2010 - The Best Business Event of the year!

This will be tight game raising stuff

If you’ve had your time making plenty of mistakes and starting businesses and now want to get into serious and focused growth mode, then Accelerate 2010 is set to make sure you start 2010 with a fresh growth focus from people doing it well right now.

With Rod and Andy Lark leading the way, this will be a no BS, straight up, put into immediate action day that helps you raise your game and sets up an increasing network of senior entrepreneurs who know how to build and sustain successful businesses. Register up at 0to60.com.

Then the day ends with an Open Air Concert At Black Barn, where Kiwi music legends Tim Finn, Bic Runga and Dave Dobbyn will again take the stage together! Choice…

Event Backed by Xero and promo site which looks hot designed by Mogul.

Consulting and Side Product Development

My first business was profitable from day one, consulting. I saved plenty from this and in parallel quietly started self funding a product development, hired a couple of people part time and after a while of getting somewhere but seemlingly not far enough, put the consulting on hold and made a good go of it together full-time.

Back to Services

When that didn’t get profitable on the money I had (made mistakes, learning experiences…), instead of raising money from others, I went back into services mode, used some of the experience and talent I’d built up from this investment and built a web design business, didn’t take too long to get this profitable.

Then back into product again

Then right at that point decided again to have a crack at a new product, except this time would keep the services company ticking away in the background to prevent the risk of hitting rock bottom on cash, which while fine is just hard and you don’t want to do too many times. While just profitable again, with no cash reserves and a desire to both build a cool product and the rails and interaction design community around NZ, I had to raise some money. Almost 5 years on in business now, I’ve raised as much money from others as I’ve invested myself, which is around $300k from each side.

Profitable Product Company coming very soon…

Through all this, the risk of trying to build a cool product, learning whats needed to get this right on the way, providing an environment where people can skill up and build experience, one aim for the busienss is always clear. You’re not a start-up to stay a startup, you’re a startup because you’re on the road to being a profitable company.

I know what numbers this means for PlanHQ, and stay pretty focused on them and what makes them move. But while most do, and I have, not everyone has to go through failure to get there, and here’s a great video from the Startup 08 gathering in San Fran David Heinemeier Hansson one of the 37signals guys who managed to get it right on the first hit.

Show me the money

I’ve run PlanHQ on Xero since we started as one of the first super early beta customers, and as someone who lives on information was pretty happy from day one that at least I finally had my last set of business information online and accessable from everywhere, which is the only place I want my business information as I travel the world, work from home. I appreciate I’m bleeding edge, but this was 18 months ago, and Xero has come forward in leaps and bounds and is a great platform for managing your accounts. Xero continues to power forward, something I’m pretty sure we can all accept doesn’t happen with any competing package software products, and you can now import your chart of accounts from MYOB to help get you over the one-off switch.

I can’t believe that anyone actually likes the idea of having their accounting information sitting on a PC somewhere in the office where they have to goto to access, or getting an export of the file from their accounts person. Going online with your accounts is not rocket science, its just smart simple business.

Money Life on Xero

Bank data comes in automagically, our accounts person Komal codes them then since all of our customer billing and payments are automated through PlanHQ, we just feed Xero with monthly sales totals for International and NZ/GST customers, and thats it, accounts are up to date, Komal can to the leg work, and I can live my life around the P&L and watch us get closer to break-even. If you’re serious about money, then managing your accounts online is the only way to go, you’ll never look back, and there’s alot more coming in the future.

This isn’t about supporting a cool local company and group of people anymore, its just about managing your finances the best way you can to grow your business, so get amongst it!

See Also: The Herald