I need to build a financial model

Five drivers, eighteen months, one page — and the assumption test that tells you what to go and find out.

The lessons, in order

1. Fixed and variable costs — The split that decides what happens when you grow, shrink, or have a bad quarter. Most founders classify their own time as neither, and that is where the trouble starts. (11 min)
2. Contribution margin and the CM ratio — How much of each sale is left to cover everything else. One number, and it answers most of the questions founders take to spreadsheets. (13 min)
3. Break-even and operating leverage — The revenue that makes you self-sufficient, and why the same structure that makes growth spectacular makes a bad quarter dangerous. (12 min)
4. Building a startup budget — A budget is not a prediction. It is a decision about what you will spend, made once, calmly, instead of forty times under pressure. (12 min)
5. Building a financial model that is worth having — Three drivers, eighteen months, one page. The value is in the assumptions you can defend, not the projections you cannot. (14 min)
6. Scenario planning — Three versions of next year — conservative, base and aggressive — so that a bad quarter is something you prepared for rather than something that happens to you. (12 min)

All Founder Academy subjects