The failure and success rates of start-ups and small businesses aren’t encouraging. According to the Small Business Association, only about 20% of small businesses won’t survive their first year, but the numbers dramatically increase year-over-year—contradicting the popular idea that most start-ups and small businesses fail within their first year of operations. In fact, many businesses fail during their highest years of growth. Only about half of start-ups and small businesses survive beyond five years, and only about one in three remain at 10 years.

To avoid failure and to flourish in an ever-changing and often unforgiving market and economy, you need a co-navigator; a partner to help guide you through the essential planning that can help your start-up survive and thrive, and help you avoid the pitfalls that can take down small businesses before they have a real chance.

When you have a love for your business, you’ll know everything about what you do, what you offer, and why. But in order to survive, and thrive, you also need to be an expert on everything else about your business; your financials, your competitors, your industry, and how it all applies to your growth and success. If you haven’t been in business very long, or at all, it may feel impossible to gather the data you need to analyze factors that will help you forecast and plan for growth well into the future.

With iCFO, our intuitive, innovative financial analysis engine acts as a navigational beacon, providing current and prospective business owners with a thorough review of current financial statements to uncover strengths and weaknesses that might otherwise remain undetected, and using that information to supply quick, easy-to-understand, and comprehensive analysis across liquidity, profitability, asset efficiency, and growth.

From there, our analyses show how your company compares against your relevant, regional industry peers and competitors so that you know what good performance looks like, what poor performance looks like, and where your company falls. Then once financial deficiencies are detected, ‘what-if’ scenarios will help you pre-screen the financial impacts of potential operational decisions, helping you make informed optimizations. Also, if you’re developing projection statements, you can utilize our Industry Metrics to ensure your projected expense and capital structures are realistic when comparing to same-size peers in your industry.

We do the heavy lifting for you; providing you with the analysis you need to understand, evaluate, and determine your major areas of concern while modeling solutions for success. We’ll help you ensure your business is primed for profitability and positioned for longevity from the beginning by helping you to determine how well your company could withstand an economic or business downturn or take on new debt obligations.

Our analysis makes the case for you to better manage your business. We analyze the data, describe potential pitfalls and areas of concern, and then prescribe applicable, realistic solutions that put power directly into your hands to handle the factors that are within your control—so you can better prepare for and manage what is not.

You can trust iCFO as your co-navigator. We’ll help you save your start-up or small business before it needs saving—with the tools, data, and financial analysis you need to understand the factors that are vitally important in today’s economy, with applicable solutions to help you grow and sustain your business.