Tag Archives: IRR

You Can Take Your IRR and Shove It

Angel investment, Business Mistakes, Venture Capital, Venture Contests,

In pitches and presentations everywhere, bright young entrepreneur tells cynical skeptical investors, usually with great pride and flourish, about their fabulous IRR for their great new startup. I get a gag reflex.

IRR stands for internal rate of return. You can check wikipedia or investopedia for what that’s supposed to mean and how it’s calculated. It’s supposed to compare cash spent on an investment, over several years, to cash that comes back, which spits out as a percentage. The higher the IRR, the better. They teach it in business schools. It’s kind of an MBA parlor game. It has some very limited usage in comparing past performance of investments, if you can hold all the definitions stable; think of it in a large company context, corporate investments, and corporate budgets.

IRR in a business pitch insults my intelligence. It depends on projected sales, costs, expenses, financing, investment, and some hypothetical valuation at some hypothetical time some years in the future. That, by definition, is a crock. Show me the projects, yes. Show me Sales, costs and expenses. Show me cash flow. Go ahead, guess at a future valuation, what the heck. I’ll look at how the assumptions come together and realism, or lack of it, on how the pieces mesh. But the IRR, which summarizing multiple layers of uncertainty as one single percentage number, is totally irrelevant at best, and downright annoying when entrepreneurs act like a projected IRR actually means anything.

And it gets worse, too: there’s the widespread misunderstanding that angel investors and venture capitalists have IRR targets. There’s the unspoken but felt thought: “jeez, what do these investors want? They turned down an IRR of 105%!” And you’ll see people, all over the web, asking what kind of yields they have to give to interest investors. What are the targets?

Talking of IRR if a projected shows me only that you’re too close to the academics. Investors will look at your plan, your team, your product/market fit, and your projections; and they’ll decide what they guess about your future. Stop sooner, before you get to IRR. Let it go.

Business Plan Contests Leave Out Bootstrappers

Bootstrapping, Business Plan Contest, Venture Contests, , ,

I consider myself something of an expert on business plan competitions. I ran one myself for several years, I’ve judged several dozen including several of the most prestigious, my company sponsors more than a dozen a year, I’ve had students in my undergrad business classes competing in them, I’m an investor member of an angel investor group that holds an annual contest, and perhaps most important, I enjoy them.

business planSo when the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) asked me to do a webinar on business plan competitions, I said yes. That’s going to happen August 18 at 1 pm PDT (and you can click here to register). And it also got me thinking about what’s right and what’s wrong with most of the business plan competitions I see. Which led to this post, about a problem I can’t solve. While it might come up in that webinar, it’s not going to be the main topic. But I do want to write about it here.

The problem is that business plan contests almost all undervalue bootstrapping. While the vast majority of startups are bootstrapped, meaning they start without venture capital or angel investment, the vast majority of business plan competitions award the best investment, not the best company.

And I’ve seen many a good-looking plan, and good-looking business, that should have been winning something but wasn’t a great investment for outsiders. It hurts to not find a prize for the startups that look really good for the owners and operators, long term, without an obvious exit, which makes them a good business but a bad investment. Why don’t they get a prize?

However, this is a hard problem to fix. How do you decide what’s a good business? High risk, low risk, change the world, maybe? It depends a lot on who you are.

Back in the late 1990s I judged some intercollegiate MBA-level contests that left the criteria for winning up to the judges. Most of the judges were investors so they leaned naturally towards awarding the top awards to the startups that seemed to offer the best investment.

I still remember a conversation we had in the judges room in 1998. One of the best businesses we’d seen said outright that they could do it without outside investment. They were there for the cash prize. They had a strong team, a good product, and a believable plan for financing themselves using early sales. Several of us thought that the best possible businesses grow themselves that way, bootstrapped; and a good shot at a $5 million business owned by its founders was, to us, a better business than a 1-in-100 shot at a $25 million business owned by investors who put in $2 million. Several others thought that a business plan competition prize should go to the best investment opportunity.

How do you compare the relatively low risk cool bootstrapped startup to the high risk, high-profile startup that might change the world? Sure, we all say the risk and return ratio, and the MBA world offers technical analyses like internal rate of return, but, as they look into the future, it’s all very subjective. It involves guesses about the future cash flows and the discount rate. There’s a lot of unequal comparisons.

But the classic business plan for investment, and the investment process, and the investment filter, are also what’s generally taught at the MBA level, a lot more than bootstrapping.

A few years ago half a dozen or so of the leaders of MBA-level business plan contests got together and, trying to solve this problem, agreed on some general standards. At that time – or so I was told; I wasn’t there – they standardized on using “the best investment” as the main criterion for determining a winner. I do sympathize. Although even this one is a complex and difficult standard to follow, it gets way worse when you drop it in favor of something even more vague.

Most of the major competitions go along with that standard. Some of them have added special channels for social entrepreneurship, with different criteria. And for the angel investment competitions, like our Willamette Angel Conference, it’s not a problem at all because we’re actually investing, so of course we want the best investment.

But in the meantime, the bootstrappers are still left out; and that’s a shame. I think it’s a problem we can’t solve easily. And it might come up in my webinar, but I won’t have a solution.  What do you think?

Big Mistake: Huge Unbelievable Sales Numbers

Angel investment, Business Plan Contest, Business Plan Marathon, Venture Capital, Venture Contests,

Jeffrey Moskovitz added an important comment to my big mistake post from last week:

I read an blog yesterday, written by someone I respect, who asserted that investors know and even EXPECT that projected sales and profits will be overstated. Aware of this expectation, the entrepreneur plays the game by inflating the numbers, fully aware that the investors will give the numbers a “haircut,” and everyone will be happy.

Jeffrey didn’t think so and I agree with Jeffrey. Emphatically agree. The idea that everybody winks at inflated numbers is a really bad idea.

My view on this hasn’t changed at all, even as years passed and I moved from entrepreneur seeking investment to angel investor reviewing business plans as part of an angel group. Here’s the way the process works, step by step:

1. Is the sales forecast believable?

Sales forecast credibility is a matter of several factors: understanding the market, size and structure of the market, selling process, channels, decision making, and so on. Granularity is really important, like the details of distribution, margins, buying points, actual names of potential buyers. Real sales already made, letters and testimonials from customers or distributors, are also important. Real Web forecasts, page views, conversion rates, and so on, are important.

If the sales forecast isn’t credible, then investors lose interest in the rest of the numbers in the plan. An unbelievable forecast voids profitability, cash flow, and supposed future valuation and investor return. The process stops.

It is true that a dumb forecast doesn’t necessarily kill potential investment. If there’s good product-market fit, scalability, defensibility, growth potential, management team, and so forth, then bad numbers are forgivable. But a bad forecast is a huge negative.

2. If so, then is profitability believable?

One of the most common errors in business plans, almost pervasive, is unbelievable profitability. As soon as projected profits go over industry averages, I disbelieve the rest of the numbers. In some rare cases (one that I posted about here Monday) entrepreneurs have real justification of those high numbers. But those are uncommon. Most of the time, it means the entrepreneurs don’t understand the business. They’ve underestimated expenses.

Even without researching the specific industry, no industry averages profits much higher than 10%. Most are closer to 5%.

If profitability isn’t believable, then I stop reading the numbers. I have no interest in cash flow or future valuation if profitability is off.

3. If so, then is cash flow believable?

Only if both sales and expenses are believable, do I look at cash flow. Does the cash flow plan recognize the impact of industry and accounts receivable? Does it show the need for investment?

And from there, to be honest, I’m back looking at larger factors, like product-market fit, management, defensibility, and scalability. I still don’t put much stock in what the business plan says the investors will get as return on investment. ROI and IRR projected out five years is an academic exercise, not a real decision factor.