The Organized Startup: Setting Things Right From the Start to Prevent Oversights

Are you planning to launch a startup but you have never done accounting & finance, HR or corporate compliance before?

Don’t jump into managing a startup without knowing what you need to know or you might end up with inaccurate financials, labor complaints, huge tax penalties, loss of integrity, or worse, dissolution of your company, among many potential consequences.

If your game plan is to just clean up the mess by hiring lawyers, accountants, and professionals after you raise funds, that is not exactly a good plan. Why?

First, it may cost more to hire professionals to fix mistakes versus simply preventing them from happening in the first place.

Second, when you are raising funds, you won’t look good to potential investors since oversights signal that you do not take corporate governance matters seriously. Continued negligence would not also sit well with your existing shareholders and may lead to an eventual loss of integrity and trust.

Third, there may be mistakes that can only be fixed at a very high cost, or worse, mistakes that unfortunately cannot be fixed at all.

That is why it’s important that just as you are starting your company, you should organize it, instead of reactively dealing with issues as they come along. The good news is - such oversights could be avoided - if only you start with the proper frameworks right from the very beginning of your startup journey.

This is what the book is about. It is (1) to help you think about some important aspects of the business which are oftentimes overlooked, and (2) to help you learn how to develop and customize frameworks (based on the local requirements and regulations applicable to your company’s domicile).

The frameworks and checklists presented here would also help guide you into thinking about the right questions to ask your service providers like lawyers and accountants. Some major problems experienced by other startups arise from situations where the right questions were never asked by the founders such as in the review of investment agreements. Unfortunately, when the right questions are not asked, some essential information may be inadvertently omitted, or some potential scenarios may not be scoped, considered or foreseen.

With The Organized Startup, you’ll learn:

How to organize your accounting & finance such as important things you need to discuss with your bookkeeper e.g. revenue recognition, accruals, capitalization of expenses, etc. and what files to retrieve when your accountant resigns
How to organize your HR such as designing processes and checklists for pre-employment, onboarding and resigning employees
Overseeing Corporate Compliance such as developing a checklist of corporate actions which require shareholder and/or board approval and what files to retrieve when you change your Corporate Secretary
Cap Table computations with simulations on convertible notes, equity financing and employee stock options
Setting up a Company Data Room which you can use for your day-to-day operations (and not just for due diligence purposes)
Though learning from one’s own mistakes is good, you don’t have to necessarily experience them in order to learn. You can learn from what others have gone through.