What it says
What this says
Current to 11 Oct 26Final board pack issued 17 Oct 2023 by CEO Nell Ashcombe. It reports contracted ARR of £56,550 across three customers and a headcount of seven, and says plainly what it does not show: cash, pipeline and usage.
What it is: an internal board pack for the quarter ending 30 Sep 2023, issued on 17 Oct 2023 by Nell Ashcombe. The status is Final in both the header and the text.
Claims: "Annual recurring revenue (contracted)" is £56,550, taken from executed order forms and excluding one-off implementation fees. It rests on three customers, so the pack says "each renewal matters a great deal".
Risks named: concentration, capacity with seven people, value evidence and data freshness. Priorities include naming an owner for each of the three accounts and writing down the value each customer gets.
Not settled: the pack carries no cash or runway view, no pipeline and no usage statistics. It is a point-in-time record from 2023, so it is not a current view of the company.
As found in this document
The document
Body
BB-Demo - Board Pack - quarter to 30 Sep 2023
Status: Final Quarter end: 30 Sep 2023 Issued: 17 Oct 2023 Author: Nell Ashcombe, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder
Purpose of this pack
This pack gives the board the position at the end of the quarter, in plain terms. It says what happened and how we know. It is short because the company is small, and I would rather the board read every line than skim a long deck.
Where the evidence is thin, the pack says so.
Headline numbers
| Measure | Position at 30 Sep 2023 |
|---|---|
| Annual recurring revenue (contracted) | £56,550 |
| Customers | 3 |
| Headcount | 7 |
The ARR figure is contracted annual subscription revenue, taken from the executed order forms. It is not a CRM estimate and it is not a forecast. It excludes one-off implementation fees.
Revenue
Contracted annual recurring revenue stands at £56,550.
Three things are worth saying about it:
Read the whole document (5,009 characters)
- It is all contracted. Nothing in the figure is a verbal commitment or a deal still in negotiation.
- It rests on three customers, so each renewal matters a great deal. The loss of any one customer would change the number visibly.
- It is subscription revenue only. Implementation fees are one-off and are tracked separately, so they should not be read into the ARR line.
I am not putting a growth rate on this. With so few customers, a percentage would say more about the size of one contract than about the business.
Customers
We have three customers. That is a small base, and every account is close to the founders.
What this means in practice
- We know each customer's team, their systems and what they ask the brain on a Monday morning.
- We can still fix problems personally, and we should keep doing that while the base is this size.
- We do not yet have a spread of tiers or sectors to learn from. Three accounts is an anecdote, not a pattern, and the board should treat any conclusion drawn from them with care.
What we are watching
- Whether each customer is asking the brain questions regularly, which is the best single measure of value we have.
- Whether each customer's data sources keep loading, so that the brain does not go stale without anyone noticing.
- Who at each customer actually uses it, so that we are not relying on one champion.
Team
Headcount is seven.
The team is small enough that nobody is a specialist in only one thing. Delivery, customer success and selling are shared between us, and the founders still carry a good share of all three.
The board should expect this to become a constraint. Implementation is a fixed-fee, time-boxed piece of work for each customer, and each new customer draws on the same few people who also look after the customers we already have. We have not yet had to choose between the two, and I would like us to see that choice coming before it arrives.
What this pack does not show
In the interest of saying how we know:
- It does not carry a cash or runway view. That belongs in a separate finance paper and I would not want a number here that was not properly built.
- It does not carry a sales pipeline. We have no pipeline figure we would stand behind at this stage.
- It does not carry usage statistics. The customer base is small enough that I would rather discuss each account in the room than reduce it to a chart.
If the board wants any of these in the next pack, tell me and we will build them properly.
Risks and watch points
| Area | Risk | What we are doing |
|---|---|---|
| Concentration | Three customers carry all the recurring revenue | Keep close to each account and agree renewal conversations early |
| Capacity | Seven people deliver, support and sell | Be clear about what we will not take on |
| Value evidence | Customers must be able to say what the brain is worth | Capture specific examples of changed meetings and saved reconciliation work |
| Data freshness | A source that stops loading goes unnoticed | Check that records keep being indexed, not just that the brain is available |
Priorities for the coming quarter
- Protect the three accounts. Each one gets a named owner and a regular conversation about what they are getting out of the brain.
- Write down the value. For each customer, a short plain statement of what changed for them, in their words where possible.
- Win the next customer well. Growth matters, but a fourth customer who is poorly served is worse than waiting.
- Keep the company writing plainly. Contracts, proposals and updates should be understood by someone who was not in the room.
Asks of the board
- Note the position at 30 Sep 2023.
- Tell me which of the missing views (cash, pipeline, usage) you want first in the next pack.
- Challenge the concentration point. If you think three customers is too few to plan hiring against, I would like to hear it.
Sign-off
Prepared and issued by Nell Ashcombe, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, on 17 Oct 2023.
Best, Nell