Pulling a SaaS Company Back from the Edge
The Situation
When I joined as CFO, the company had 45 people and less than nine months of cash runway. The founding team hadn't modelled it that way — but the information was all there. On day one I did what any CFO does: mapped historical cash flows against the forward forecast. The picture was unambiguous.
The problems were layered. Product development costs were high, locked into an outsourcing contract that hadn't been stress-tested against revenue assumptions. Overhead was carrying expenses that had no business being there at that burn rate. And the sales pipeline, while it looked active, wasn't converting. Prospects were circling but not closing.
Nobody had called it a crisis yet. I did.
What We Did
The first conversation I had with the executive team was uncomfortable. The urgency I was signalling wasn't what they expected from a new CFO in week one. But the numbers didn't leave room for a softer framing.
We pursued a capital raise in parallel, including overseas roadshows in the US and Europe. That went nowhere. The product didn't map to those markets, and we learned that faster than we would have liked.
With the raise stalling, we pulled three levers simultaneously.
Renegotiated the outsourcing contract. Reduced scope, reduced burn. Not elegant, but necessary.
Structured a customer prepayment. We approached an existing customer and negotiated upfront payment on a contract, sacrificing future upside to get cash now. The Head of Ops and I led that negotiation. It bought us three to four months of runway, which turned out to be exactly what we needed.
Drew advances on the R&D tax incentive. A mechanism most founders don't think to use under pressure. We used it.
The Outcome
Government infrastructure funding came through fourteen months after we first identified it as the most viable path. There were no guarantees it would. The company survived, stabilised, and subsequently pivoted to focus on a niche where it had genuine product-market fit.
The lesson isn't that we executed a perfect turnaround. It's that identifying the problem clearly and early, and being willing to say so out loud, created the time needed to find a way through.