CredSimple CEO Pays it Forward with an Open-source Financial Model

As early-stage investors, nothing pains us more than watching founders waste precious hours struggling to tackle the same set of predictable operational problems that legions of their peers have already encountered and successfully resolved. We built our Primary Expert Network as a direct response to this dynamic, and we remain squarely focused on finding new ways to provide material benefit to our portfolio companies and to the NYC Tech community at large.

In the same vein of open-sourcing startup advice, we are pleased to share this well-thought-out operating model built by Mike Simmons, founder and CEO of healthcare IT company CredSimple. Building a solid operating model that can serve as a roadmap of a company’s financial growth is an area that trips up many first-time founders in the earliest days of their startup. Businesses at this stage rarely have senior finance team members in place, so the responsibility for financial modeling tends to fall on the shoulders of the founders themselves — many of whom have limited experience with this type of work.

Leading up to CredSimple’s recent financing process, Mike and his colleagues have been busy hammering out a solid operating plan. It is the product of trial and error, lessons learned from investors and finance professionals, and the advice of other founders who have lived through these pain points themselves. In true “pay it forward” fashion, Mike has made his operating model template available for widespread use so that founders of early-stage startups can benefit from his work and use it as solid foundation for their own modeling needs.

We are pleased to share Mike’s operating plan with you here. We commend him both for putting together such a robust and well-informed tool, as well as for his generosity of spirit in disseminating the finished product to the broader entrepreneurial community.