🥂 2024 - No excuses, dive in.

Can we stop saying HNY now?

Hello 👋. It's our January edition of No Half Sends, and we’ve all turned a page into the new year. Whether you believe in New Years’ resolutions or not, we’re glad you’re here.

To frame our update: we help growth companies elevate their financial data through tech-forward accounting and finance services. We’re beginning our second year of operations.

Let’s Dive In 👇.

💥 TL;DR: Full Send

1. Ditch the annual planning cycle 🙀
2. Our Goals & New Formula 💪
3. SaaS Benchmarking & Deep ‘24 Predictions 🎱
4. A WILD Denver Startup Story 🐍
5. We’re hiring, some hot tips, and fun rainforest facts 🌴

December is for Budgeting, January is for Actioning

It’s been said that nearly 46% of companies operate without a budget (source: Clutch ‘21) and the other 54% set one up and then forget about it in January (source: me). Here’s what Founders should be doing instead of long-term budgeting:

• Set directional goals for the year, attribute dollars to said goals, and publish the attributed dollars to goals as your ‘budget’.
• This is the step where most people set up a 12mo budget, then forget it… Here’s where to go next 👇
• Ditch your static 12mo budget and instead utilize your goal-based dollar allocation and build a dynamic 2-3 month rolling forecast. Preferably in a software and not excel (hi 👋 Fathom). Let us know if you need help with that.
• Continue to iterate, pivot, and update your rolling forecast against your actual data on a monthly basis moving forward thereafter.

Our 2024 Planning Cycle

With a new year comes new goals, new budgets, and new energy. In order to continue elevating financial data to yield actionable financial data for founders and CEOs, here are 3 of our goals:

• Formalize our financial data / analytics offerings for both SaaS + CPG. We currently have a highly customized approach to data aggregation and integrations (over 100+), but would like to create more consistency in our deliverables. It’s a high caliber offering and we believe accountants should be on the forefront of actionable data.

• We are honing in on scale and growth-mode Technology, CPG, and Services companies as a core focus and will be creating more opportunity and engagement in each of these industries in 2024.
• We are launching v1.5 of the Full Send Formula » f(x). Our Formula is foundational to ensuring our client relationships thrive, our team is engaged, and our services drive consistent and actionable data.

The Full Send f(x)

In addition to ditching the 12mo budget, we’ve also ditched the 12mo annual planning cycle. We’re experimenting with Brian Moran’s philosophy of the 12 Week Year. Our year is now 12 weeks » time to get to work.

Our first objective is to nail the Full Send Formula. We are expanding on our existing foundation of work and introducing a high degree of rigor and consistency to how we operate. This work is foundational to allow us to serve clients more intentionally, create an incredible place for employees to work, and build towards a better outcome for all of those connected to Full Send. More to come at the end of our 12 week cycle.

We mistakenly believe that there is a lot of time left in the year, and we act accordingly. We lack a sense of urgency, not realizing that every week is important, every day is important, every moment is important. Ultimately, effective execution happens daily and weekly!‍

Brian P. Moran, The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months

Give us feedback on what’s working, what could use improvement, and how we can better serve our clients, community, and industry - howdy@fullsendfinance.com.

🚀 Need to know: Startups

> OpenView 2023 SaaS Benchmarks Report. It’s always good to know where you stack up related to your peers, right? Here’s a great market overview for $1-$20M ARR SaaS companies. Be wary of benchmark data though - if everyone strived to the median in a data set we would have a whole lot of Doug Flutie’s and no Tom Brady’s. (Download Here)

> Some Srsly Deep 2024 VC Predictions. Dr. Ola (Orekunrin) Brown, Founder of HealthCap Africa, published her thoughts on 2024. My biggest takeaway - continued macro volatility will continue to create hesitation for many investors, but the smart ones will continue to invest as previously scheduled - “…Be greedy when others are fearful”. - Buffett (Here’s a link to her predictions)

> Bezos invested in a Search Engine 👀. Perplexity AI raised $70M, being valued at $520M, to create a natural language search engine. Are we moving to paid search? How will ad revenue change relative to traditional search? Are you ready to pay for a search engine? (More)

🏗️ Colorado Startups: Our Backyard

> Colorado has a WIDE variety of grants and low-interest funding options available to new and young growing businesses in our state. The Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT) teamed up with the University of Colorado in Q4 to provide $1.5M in grant funding to CU’s Lab Venture Challenge. Check out their funding options. (OEDIT Funding Options, CU Lab Venture Challenge)

> Holy $#!%. This might become a Netflix documentary. If you’ve been around the Colorado Startup scene for a while, you might remember Aaron Clark and Justice Reskill. Here’s 5280’s deep dive on the very long and fascinating story riddled with intrigue. I hope he’s moving his personal decision making in a positive direction as he’s indicated in the article. (The Con Artist on the Front Range)

💸 Need to know: Fundraising

> 🎉 Congratulations to Dapple Security and Founder, Gadalia O’Bryan, on a recent $2M+ of fresh capital to scale their digital access and identity protection solution. (About Dapple)

> Eyes on She’s Independent on their most recent syndicate and Form D filing of raised capital. Excited to see how they allocate their capital moving forward. We support their mission to get more women on cap tables, in the boardroom, and in positions of authority. (About She’s Independent)

Are you fundraising? Know someone who is? We plan to share opportunities for those in our network who are seeking capital, connections, or resources. Reach out to us at howdy@fullsendfinance.com to discuss being featured.

Help share No Half Sends 🙏

Wouldn’t the accounting, finance, and startup world be a better place if more people had access to top-notch accounting and relatable humans? Take a minute to share our newsletter with your friends—They’ll thank you for having access to accountants with flair. Send them here.

👉 If you’d like to be featured or have a message that would be helpful for our community, please let us know:

• If you’d like to broadcast your current or upcoming fundraise
• If you’ve shipped a new product or launched in market
• If you’re hiring and want to spread the word

We want to amplify voices of the builders, backers, and servant leaders. Reach out!

🏔️ Sending it in the Wild

> We’re hiring an Accounting Senior / Accounting Manager. We’d love to get on the radar of any awesome accountants that you know that want a more engaging role, check out our posting here - we are actively interviewing - forward to friends.

> Want to learn how to assemble a really good network and investor email update? Learn from Cody Eddings and Anis Taylor from SnapRefund » here’s their structure.

> In December, Full Send had our first-ever holiday party with more than one in attendance. We had a grand time gallivanting around Denver. Proof below 🙌

Clickbait: 70% of useful plants in the treatment of cancer are only found in rainforests. Science has analyzed less than 1% of rainforest plants 🤯.

‍

✌️ Roman @ Full Send

Why Full Send? We’re on a mission to elevate financial data through high quality accounting and finance services, building more knowledgeable and engaged team members, and engaging in our industry to move accounting and finance forward.

Send us your feedback at howdy@fullsendfinance.com and help us stay as sendy as humanly possible. We’re ready to listen.