The founder came to us with a real problem and a fast clock. He’d been running a multi-brand D2C operation through five legally distinct companies for four years — a structure that made sense for tax, IP and risk reasons, but made absolute nonsense to investors. The seed round had to close inside a quarter. Without a single consolidated story, it wasn’t going to.
The situation
Each entity had its own Xero ledger, its own management accountant, its own VAT cadence, and (in two cases) its own bookkeeper. None of them talked to each other in any meaningful sense. Inter-company transactions were tracked in a spreadsheet on the founder’s desktop. Each entity had a balance sheet; nobody could tell you the group’s.
Two of the entities were experimental sub-brands consuming working capital from the main trading company. One was a dormant IP holding entity that should have been earning a licensing fee but wasn’t. One was fulfilment, which was bleeding because of un-recharged warehouse costs. The fifth — the main trading company — was profitable but its margins looked nothing like a normal D2C P&L because half of its real costs were sitting in the fulfilment entity.
Why investors couldn’t price it
The three investors at the front of the round had each asked variants of the same five questions: what is the real group EBITDA, where is the working capital trapped, what does the operating company look like on a normalised basis, what is the cohort behaviour of new acquisitions, and show me a 36-month forecast under three scenarios. None of those answers existed in a form anyone could send to a credit committee.
The investor Q&A didn’t need new facts — it needed the existing facts assembled into one truthful number.
What we built
Across twelve weeks, two of us — a Finox senior plus the founder’s side — assembled the following:
1 · Consolidated three-statement model
A single integrated three-statement model (P&L, balance sheet, cashflow) covering all five entities at 60 months. Built in Google Sheets with a discipline most founders skip: every input cell colour-coded, every formula tested, every projection traceable to a driver. Six sheets total: assumptions, historicals (entity-by-entity), consolidation logic, forecast, board view, scenarios.
2 · Cohort retention layer
The investors wanted the real D2C question answered: how do new customers behave over 12 / 24 / 36 months? We pulled four years of Shopify data, built a triangle, fitted a retention curve, and let the founder see for the first time what his actual repeat behaviour was. The answer was better than he’d been claiming (his pitch under-sold it) and we adjusted the deck accordingly.
3 · ROAS & download-funnel feeder
The marketing engine ran through Meta, Google and one influencer channel. We built a single source-of-truth feeder showing ROAS by channel, by cohort, by month — with the unit-economics math (CAC, payback period, LTV/CAC) computed directly off the same data. Investors had a single page that answered their unit economics questions; no slide deck needed.
4 · Inter-company reconciliation
The biggest unglamorous job. Twelve months of inter-company flows, line by line, recharged and netted. Once that was clean, the fulfilment entity’s margins made sense. The trading company’s margins normalised. The group EBITDA became a number you could put in front of a partner without flinching.
5 · Scenarios & runway
Base / aggressive / conservative. The conservative case was the one we cared about: under what conditions does this group go below £100k cash? At what month does “default alive” become “default dead”? Investors read the conservative scenario first; it was the strongest part of the pitch precisely because we hadn’t flinched.
6 · Staff plan
A 24-month hire-by-hire build with assumptions on salaries, on-costs, NI, employer pension. Tied directly to the revenue model: each hire was a multiplier or a fixed cost, never a hopeful line item.
What we didn’t do
We didn’t restructure the group. The five-entity structure had real tax and risk reasons; the right call was to leave it intact and consolidate at the reporting layer. We didn’t replace the existing bookkeepers; we layered on top of their work. We didn’t introduce new software — the consolidation happened in Sheets, by design, because the founder needed to be able to open the model himself at 11pm on a Sunday without paying a per-seat fee to anybody.
How it landed
The model went into the data room in week 9. The Q&A from the lead investor came back at week 10. The founder answered every question live on the call, model on screen — not in a follow-up email. Term sheet signed by week 11. Round closed (clean SAFE conversion + new equity) by week 14.
The £5m follow-on currently in motion is being run from the same model. We’re now embedded on a Scale-tier monthly retainer; the founder owns the model and the data, we maintain it.
The numbers, plainly
- Engagement length: 12 weeks (Q1–Q2 2026)
- Hours invested by Finox: ~180 across the two-person team
- Outputs: 6-sheet model, 22-slide investor deck collaboration, 14-page data room write-up, 60-minute live Q&A presentation, monthly board pack template
- Tooling: Xero (5 ledgers), Google Sheets (consolidation), Notion (deal room sub-pages), Shopify (cohort data), Meta & Google Ads (CAC inputs)
- Outcome: £2m round closed; £5m follow-on under term sheet at the time of writing
What this kind of engagement costs
This engagement sat between a one-off investor model build and an embedded fractional CFO. We typically run it as:
- £2.5–7.5k one-off model build for simpler single-entity startups, or
- £3–6k/mo Scale tier for multi-entity / multi-stage groups with ongoing rounds, with the model build and DD response included.
For this client, the right answer was a Scale retainer started before the round — so the model was their model from day one, not a Finox deliverable handed across.
This case study describes a real engagement with a real outcome. The founder’s name and the operating-company brand have been withheld pending the founder’s written approval to publish. Numbers in this page are accurate to the engagement; specific brand attribution available on request via info@finox.co.uk.