The First 90 Days After You Raise

The wire clears and the balance in your account is larger than it has ever been. The natural pull is to act on it, to make the hires you have held off, to take the office and the tools you have wanted. Some of that is right. The more important work of the first quarter is quieter: setting the habits that decide whether the money lasts the way it is meant to.

A round is raised to buy time and a set of results. Spend the first 90 days well and you reach your next stage in control, with the milestones hit and a few months of runway still in hand. Spend them badly and you find out much later, when the balance is lower than the progress justifies.

Get a clear view of the money before you touch it

You cannot manage what you cannot see, and a large balance hides problems rather than solving them. Before anything is committed, get four things straight.

• Where it landed, and in what currency. A round often arrives in a dollar account or an offshore holding company while the business runs on local currency at home, paying salaries and suppliers. Decide how much to hold where, and plan for the time and cost of moving and converting it, because getting money in and out of the country can quietly take weeks and a slice of the total. The balance you see is not always the cash you can spend at home next week.
• Who can move it. Set who can approve and release payments, and above what size a second person has to sign off. This can be slow to arrange with a bank, but it is worth doing early: the loss these controls prevent is far harder to recover from than the setup is to complete.
• Your real balance. The number in the account is not your money. Subtract what you already owe: the bills due, the tax set aside, the payroll about to run. What is left is what you actually have to work with.
• How many months it buys. Divide the real balance by your monthly net burn. That number, your runway, is the single figure that should sit behind every decision for the rest of the round.

Turn the deck into a plan the board has agreed

You raised on a story about what this money would do. The first job is to turn that story into an operating budget, month by month, that you and your board both hold. The deck said where you are going. The budget says what it costs to get there and when.

This matters for a specific reason. The plan you agree now becomes the plan you are measured against. If it is vague, every later conversation about progress is a negotiation. If it is clear, the board can see at a glance whether you are on track, and so can you. Building a budget and forecast your board will trust is worth doing properly in the first month, while the assumptions behind the raise are still fresh.

Agree, in writing, two things with your board: the milestones this round is meant to reach, and roughly what the money buys to get there. Everything that follows is easier when both are settled early.

Resist scaling everything at once

A full balance makes every hire look affordable, and that is the trap. A hire costs far more than the first month’s salary. You are committing to the full salary for as long as they stay, plus the tools and management around them, and that draws down a balance that does not replenish on its own. It is covered only as revenue grows to meet it, or by another round you may or may not raise.

The discipline is to sequence your spending. Decide which results will take you to your next stage, and add cost only as you reach the work that needs it: hire the salesperson when there is something to sell, not months ahead of it. The opposite is the common mistake. A founder hires the whole plan in the first month or two, a milestone then slips, and the company is left burning at full speed with no runway to fund the fix. The rule for the first quarter is plain: spend behind your progress, not ahead of it.

Set the reporting rhythm early

The habits you start in the first 90 days are the ones you keep. It is far easier to start a monthly reporting cycle now, while the company is small and the numbers are simple, than to build one later, when the company is bigger and you are reaching for it because something has already gone wrong.

Put two rhythms in place. A monthly internal close, where your books are brought up to date and you produce a short management view of performance and cash, so you are never guessing about your own position. And a regular update to your investors, so the people who backed you hear from you before they have to ask. A steady investor update is one of the cheapest ways to keep the relationship strong and the next round warm.

If keeping this monthly rhythm going is more than you or your team can manage, that is a sign you need senior finance help. That is the question the post do I need a CFO yet answers, and for many founders the first 90 days is when the answer becomes yes.

What this means for founders

The work of the first quarter is quiet, and it is easy to skip. It never shows up in a demo or a growth chart, and it never feels as good as making a new hire. But it decides one thing: whether the round gets you to a stronger position, or runs out before you get there.

It comes down to four quiet moves: see the money clearly, agree the plan you will be judged against, sequence the spending to milestones, and start the monthly rhythm early. Most of it is done in the first month.

This is the work we do at The SME CFO. We help founders across Africa and the diaspora turn a fresh round into a clear operating plan, with the controls and monthly reporting to run it, without hiring a full-time finance team before they need one. If you have just raised, or are about to, book a consultation and we will help you set up the first quarter properly.