Post | Martin Hurych

"For healthy corporate finances, you need cash, a plan, a report and a capable CFO.“

Michal Belan | CEO @ Symfio.app

Do you manage your company by the balance in your bank account? Then you run the risk of overlooking major issues that could put your business at risk. And if you see financial planning as a necessary evil, it's time for a change. This episode will show you why good financial processes are not only the key to survival, but also to growth.

My guest is Michal Belan, founder and CEO of Symfio, a company that turns chaos in finance into a clear system. Michal has a wealth of experience in corporate financial management - from analyst to CFO to head of a technology company. In business, as in a marathon, he knows how to keep running even when you hit a wall. And that's exactly what he'll impart in this episode: how to navigate finance so that you never go in blind again.

Together, we've dissected:

🔸 Why most companies fail within five years and how to improve your chances of survival.

🔸 How to plan your cash flow so that even unexpected expenses don't take you by surprise.

🔸 When is a loan a smart move and when is it just delaying the inevitable.

🔸 Why a good CFO is not just an analyst, but your strategic partner.

🔸 How to remove financial blindness from your company and run it by numbers, not feelings.

This episode is not just about numbers. It shows you how finance affects every aspect of your business - from scaling, to crisis moments, to successful growth. If you feel like your finances are more on the sidelines, listen to this interview to find out how to change that.

UNMANAGED GROWTH: THE FASTEST PATH TO FINANCIAL RUIN (PŘEPIS ROZHOVORU)

Who is Michal Belan

Martin Hurych

Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. If you like what I'm doing, whether it's my blog articles or right here on Zážeh, consider signing up for my newsletter list. I call it My Notebook and today over 1,100 owners and directors of manufacturing, engineering and technology companies subscribe to it. Today it's going to be about finance, today it's going to be about getting finance right, and for that I've brought in a guest from the most knowledgeable people. He's a guy who's been steeped in finance from top to bottom, a guy who was a financial analyst and then was a CFO of a small and medium-sized company for a while. Today, because of everything he knows about finance, he has set up a special technology company that deals with finance and is creating one tool for finance to manage . Today I have the founder and CEO of Symfio, Michal Belan. Hi.

Michal Belan

Hi, and thanks so much for inviting me.

How does it feel to run against the wall?

Martin Hurych

I have learned that you are an avid marathoner, you have completed several, you are planning another, and you just recently returned from the New York City Marathon. I probably don't want to discuss times here, but as someone who has never run a marathon in my life, I've heard that a marathoner has a wall somewhere around mile 35. What's it like to run into a wall?

Michal Belan

To begin with, in my case the time wasn't that unimportant - I managed to do it in 3 hours 53 minutes, which is a pretty good time in New York. There are a lot of hills, bridges to cross, and a lot of different obstacles along the course.

As for the wall - by running my fourth marathon, I've had the experience that these things don't happen as much. I have a concept I call "teleport". Practically, it means that when I start to suffer, I just look down at the ground, possibly yell at myself, and go from there 35. I somehow manage to teleport all the way to 40. There are mostly spectators there, the atmosphere is great and suddenly you are at the finish line and you are absolutely thrilled.

Martin Hurych

Have you ever run into walls and made noises like that in business?

Michal Belan

Practically about once a quarter. Something always happening, you hit a wall, it's quite similar to running - only then you have to get up, find out that you really hit the wall, and move on.

What does Symfio do?

Martin Hurych

So come tell us what you do at Symphium.

Michal Belan

Symfio as such has existed for the last year, but overall we have been operating for five years. First we were called Proefo, which stood for Professional External Financial Officer, and for four years we were basically an agency business. We provided external CFO services to startups that were already scaling in some way, or mid-sized agencies that lacked a finance department - that's where we put our external CFO.

This went hand in hand with business intelligence, with Power BI, which we implemented. We also implemented new accounting for some clients. We basically operated as an outsourced finance department for small and medium-sized businesses for four years. After four years, we had almost 50 clients, and we found that the technology solutions that we created in those 50 or so Power BI applications were still recurring.

There were some Excel tools, a technology and engineering stack - and that appealed to our first pre-seed investor. So what we did was we consolidated all those 50 applications into one cloud-based application and we also changed the name to Symfio, which stands for Symphonized financial office.

The core of our business is now primarily providing this application to existing finance teams. We're trying to focus more on companies where the finance team is already in place - where they're working with Excel, PDF documents, constantly editing, sending, debugging.

Our added value lies in the fact that we can link several accounting software from different countries and connect multiple financial plans. Essentially, Symfia has become a technology hub for

financial data in one . We started focusing on this concept last when started the transformation and have been fully operational for about half a year.

Martin Hurych

As an amateur in finance, I would understand that you provide some management reporting and management accounting?

Michal Belan

Practically, yes. The key thing on which this is based is management accounting. The reason is,

that the more a company grows, the more it makes sense to use accounting data.

It doesn't quite make sense to have two separate sources - to do your financial reporting somewhere on the side and to have accounting data that the accountant processes only for statutory reporting. It makes much more sense to combine the two.

Our platform goes the extra mile to ensure that accounting data is used as efficiently as possible. The goal is to avoid having to do a lot of manual editing, to be methodically structured and logically linked.

This would allow finance teams to work efficiently with data without having to constantly manually edit and correct things.

What is the typical mistake startup founders make?

Martin Hurych

You've been through the stock market, you've been CFO of several , so you're really into finance. My targets are smaller, medium-sized companies, technical, technology. What's the typical mistake that owners of these companies make in finance?

Michal Belan

When we look at companies by size, from the very beginning to more mature businesses, makes sense to hire a CFO or at least someone with a financial background as early as possible. It's imperative to start looking at the data before the company even starts keeping the books.

It is necessary to have a financial plan the moment you plan to bring an idea to market. If we take technology companies, it often happens that the founders give up. Maybe they believe too much in their own genius and hope that it will somehow turn a profit on its own.

But if it's not clear from the start how the company will make economic , 's the first big mistake. We live in capitalism, so everything a company does has to make economic sense. If an idea is not economically viable from the start, then it usually doesn't make sense to implement it.

Another problem is that when tech founders do make plans, they often blindly believe them instead of basing them on real data. This is a bit of a lie in their own pocket. For example, they start a business, but their assumptions about how the business will perform are extremely optimistic. After a few years, they find out that the business never achieved the projected results and probably won't even come close.

In such a case, someone has burned several years of their life, a lot of money and time, not only their own but also other people's - and yet it could have been clear from the beginning that they either had to do it differently or not at all.

What is the typical mistake scale-up companies make?

Martin Hurych

I understand the business I run, I something. I've talked a couple of times on the podcast here about how a lot of people I see manage their finances based on their bank account balance. What do you see as the biggest mistakes that owners make at this stage?

Michal Belan

For companies that have already passed the idea phase and are somehow operational, financial management is divided into two parts. The first is cash flow management - that is, working with cash. At this stage, owners often manage the business by account balance only.

That's not a bad thing, because cash is like oxygen to a company. Once a company runs out of oxygen, it doesn't matter how profitable it is or how cool it is - it just ends. So the key metric is the bank balance, and the entrepreneur should at least know if he or she has enough cash to cover monthly expenses.

The second part is strategic - i.e. whether the company is heading for profit. Most often this can be read from the accounts. Unfortunately, most accountants today do not work in the interest of the entrepreneur. They just want to do their job, file VAT and that's it.

If a business owner looks at the accounting data, they often can't make sense of it. So the second biggest mistake is that companies glue together numbers from different sources - one from accounting, the other from their own calculations that no one checks. As a result, the company doesn't know how much it is really earning.

When we asked companies within the business how they make their decisions, most said by feel. That's a classic evergreen, but it shouldn't be that way at all. Founders should know from the early stages of the company exactly where they are burning money, what their profitability is and where it is going.

This brings me to the third key thing that is absolutely necessary but often missing - and that is forecasting, especially at the cash flow level. The smaller the company, the more sense it makes to start with cash flow forecasting. You should always have an idea of what will happen in the next 3 to 6 months.

But this is often not done, and when it is, it is again only in feeling, which is a big problem.

What is forecasting?

Martin Hurych

If this is the first Ignition anyone is listening to, come explain in two sentences what you mean by forecasting.

Michal Belan

If we simplify it, every company has some cash income and expenses. This means that we receive

money from some clients while paying employees, freelancers or office fees. In very simple terms, forecasting means putting that data into a spreadsheet - i.e. how much we have from whom, planning or estimating how much we will receive in the next period, and doing the same for expenditure.

That means looking at who we have on our team, how much we're paying them, how much we're going to pay them in the next few months, if we're going to hire someone new if a new client comes in and pays us a certain amount. If we hire someone for that client, we need to know how much it's going to cost them.

The whole idea is to make it clear what the company's financial results will look like in the future. Such a simple exercise can substantially reduce the high failure rate that new companies often have.

How to properly design the accounting structure?

Martin Hurych

You said that in order not to have to keep two accounts, one for the state, one for the management, it is good to use the accounting data. My experience is that accountants often throw very different costs into the same groups and then you don't get anything out of it. So how and who should set up or change the structure in the new year so that it actually gives me the data that you're so sophisticatedly talking about here?

Michal Belan

This is absolutely key when a company is starting to focus on accounting data or building management accounting. The structure has to make sense right from the start, because based on it, the accounting department will get clear instructions and the operations people will know how to categorize the various costs and revenues.

Exactly as you say - if it's not set up properly, a company can end up at a where there's they can do about it. Then you can just passively watch the numbers and be surprised, but it's impossible to actively work with them.

When we implement our application or provide CFO services, setting up the right structure is always the first step. This process consists of several parts that must be well thought out at the beginning.

The first step is to set up the analytical accounts in a way that makes sense and allows for automatic margin calculation. Gross margin, operating margin and net margin should be the natural output of this structure.

For example, gross margin is synonymous with scalability - the higher the gross margin a company has, easier it is to scale. This is what analytical accounts should help to do. In practice, this means that planning and forecasting does not deal directly with accounts, but rather with categories or larger units such as sales, marketing, freelancers or office costs.

This is then interwoven with management accounting elements such as centres, activities and contracts. This is a standard concept that is named in all accounting software systems.

The centres should reflect the individual departments in the company. They should be set up so that budgeting can be done accordingly. Let's simplify it to sales - there is a chief salesperson who is responsible for his/her center, a specific line on the income statement and for the budget.

The structure should also correspond to the organizational structure of the company. Management accounting should go hand in hand with the organizational structure to not only generate and analyze data, but to make it meaningfully embedded in the management of the firm.

When a company scales, its structure should allow for efficient growth. It shouldn't be case that all responsibility lies with the founder or C-level managers - the bigger the firm gets, the more responsibilities and budgets should be delegated to other people.

Then there are activities and contracts. Contracts are basically projects and the accounts should clearly show how much the company has earned on each project. For example, if it is an agency that provides services, it should be clear what the financial benefit of each contract was.

It's not always easy to set this up, as one person may be working on multiple projects at the same time, but we don't need to go into detail now - the important thing is that this information should be visible from the accounting.

Activity is a broader concept that can be bent in different ways - it can be a legitimate activity or an entire business model. If someone runs multiple businesses, for example an agency develops bespoke software, provides a SaaS service and does implementations for that, then using activities can be used to divide the business into more detailed units that can exist separately and be tracked separately.

How to set up reporting for a company of 5-10 people?

Martin Hurych

That's the ideal situation we've described, and I imagine that a lot of companies from 50 people upwards have this because they already have a corporate person who is responsible for finance. What should I measure when there are 5, 10 of us and we have a small software company?

Michal Belan

The the company, the less sense it makes to track everything - the cost-benefit of maintaining an elaborate management structure is simply not there.

The company should have at least one month's operating expenses in the account, ideally more. Not everyone wants to sleep in the uncertainty that tomorrow something will go wrong and then we will have to find money in a hurry. So the first key thing is to know how much money we burn, how much we spend each month and how we are with cash flow.

The second important area is profitability - that is, not only whether we are generating cash or burning cash, but also, from a bottom line perspective, whether we are in profit. And if we're not, knowing why and what the plan is.

Last point - have a plan. Without it, things are done blindly. Once there is a meaningful plan with a well set structure, one can continuously monitor whether or not the company is getting there.

Usually, companies deviate in a rather negative direction, so they often do not fulfil it.

What do I track to know my business is down?

Martin Hurych

We are not going to have an easy time, the business and economic environment is expected to be increasingly difficult for many of us. How can I tell from the financials that I should have already started to slow down or cut back somewhere, or that I should at least be more vigilant? We're talking about owners who aren't necessarily complete financial pros. What are a few parameters to watch for and where to already say this is not enough? Let's give two examples of when it's already a bummer for, say, a software company and when it's a bummer for manufacturing.

Michal Belan

I'm going to partially repeat what I mentioned at the beginning - the key things for financial management, the things that show that things are not going in the right direction. It's always going to be an updated cash flow forecast at that cash level.

You need to paint a picture of what the revenue picture looks like - the revenue is the very first key thing. As soon as it looks like the economy is slowing down, or business is slowing down, or we're developing technologies that aren't in as much demand anymore, if the funders are pouring pure wine, the curves will start to fall as soon as possible.

Sometimes some clients leave - that's called churn. For example, if churn starts to increase at a technology company for some reason and planned spending starts to decline in the future, it's a good sign that something will have to change on the spending side.

This is the very basics of how to figure it out. Often, most types of business are tracked by so-called industry , so it's not just about the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow.

When we talk about SaaS companies, we go into detail on metrics such as customer acquisition cost - how much it costs to acquire a new customer, or churn rate and retention - how much revenue is

repeats every month. These metrics can often , even without detailed planning, that there is a bug in the software somewhere.

For example, while there are some rough benchmarks for B2B SaaS where churn is around 2%, if we get above that, we know the future doesn't look good. We still have to fill some gap in the business that is causing clients to leave. It is also important to monitor retention, i.e. how much income is recurring each month. If retention is dropping, clients are leaving, or average revenue per client is decreasing, this can be a clear indication that there is a problem somewhere.

This applies to all types of business. There are different market benchmarks, but every business has some specifics - but if the trend starts going in the wrong direction, it's high time to address something.

When is a loan beneficial for a company? And when is it a postponement of death?

Martin Hurych

You have introduced a very interesting topic in your preparation, which I would like to discuss here. As some companies have not done well and will not do , they are thinking about how to bridge some of the tougher times, perhaps with the help of a loan. When is credit just putting off the funeral for you and when is credit really the acceleration kick that will save the company and turn it around into growth again?

Michal Belan

Before I get into this, I would like to say that my colleague Honza Gabriel and I refer to overdraft as a kind of cocaine for companies. Once a company gets used to it, it is very difficult to get rid of it. This is generally true of all debt instruments, as long as they are just plugging operational holes. These holes are created because the company is not functioning optimally, is in loss or is in financial trouble.

If a company is constantly losing money, getting worse year after year, and borrowing to cover those losses, then it is only delaying its demise. As the debt grows, interest will eventually bury it. In the stock market, such companies are known as zombie companies - companies that practically exist only to pay off their debt.

Martin Hurych

So, if I understand correctly, taking out a loan to fund OPEX is nonsense and really I'm just putting off the funeral.

Michal Belan

Practically, yes. It makes the most sense to borrow for sales and marketing, for example, because these are costs that have a built-in return. Unless somebody gets it downright wrong and throws the money away completely pointlessly, they should get a return - they should bring in more revenue and be covered as the company grows.

If the company is a scaling startup and needs to recruit new developers, in theory it would seem that this is an OPEX (operating expense). But in reality, this development will add value, allow new features to be introduced and make the product more valuable. So, based on this logic, the company should see an increase in revenue, so this expense may have long-term benefits. Anything that will help the firm grow in the future is legitimate to finance with debt.

Why is financial management not just filling in spreadsheets?

Martin Hurych

What have we forgotten in financial management?

Michal Belan

Perhaps it is worth pointing out that financial management is still a discipline that is about people. Finance exists partly because of capitalism, but it also serves to show in detail how individual business activities work. But it always ends up being about specific people.

The company that provides the software has programmers who create the software. They then the software to communicate with clients, who in turn are the people who pay for it and use it. Financial management is therefore not just about spreadsheets and numbers, but primarily about how the company operates internally and how it communicates across the organisation and to clients.

It is important to note that the data is generated primarily in the accounting department.

Accountants often operate in a somewhat old-school way, so if we were to talk about modern financial management, accountants should have a modern approach and a "can-do" mindset. She should be moving towards technology and especially the finance team to help them get the data in the best possible form. That's actually the first part of the whole chain - going towards people so that they can then go towards the rest of the company.

The same applies to finance managers and CFOs. They get data to influence not only their internal teams but also pricing for clients, and their decisions again impact other people. They should take a modern approach where they try to make decisions as quickly and efficiently as possible.

This means that the company should not suffer from operational blindness and unnecessary bureaucracy, where everything takes a long time and everyone has "enough time". On the contrary, people should always have relevant data to make decisions so that the company can operate quickly and efficiently. This can only be achieved spreadsheets, numbers and all data have the right access to the people who need to work with them.

How to tell a good CFO from a finance manager?

Martin Hurych

Now you've hit on a serious topic, you actually describe people in finance as very business oriented. My experience both personally and in client companies is quite the opposite. Now, if we're motivating someone to select, say, the very first or new person control the finances in my company, how do I really know a good CFO from a great one, but still just a controller?

Michal Belan

The most important aspect is that the CFO must be decisive and take responsibility for what he recommends. Of course, it is assumed that most financial managers and CFOs can put together financial data.

But the difference between a good and average CFO is that a good CFO can not only analyze the numbers, but also draw clear conclusions from them. For example, he can say, "We're burning too much on costs, we have three products, this one doesn't make sense - let's cut it." Or, Let's reduce its price, or agree with the sales team to focus on a more promising product at the expense of the others."

In practice, it's about the CFO being a partner, a wingman for the CEO, helping him with decisions and showing him what options are on the . A lot of possible solutions will emerge based on the numbers, and the CFO should provide the CEO with not only an overview of them, but also a clear recommendation of what is best.

At the same time, he should be able to say, These are the best options, this is not so anymore." And that's where I think CFOs really differ - the average CFO might just gather data and leave the decision to the CEO, whereas a great CFO comes up with a clear strategy and suggestions for specific actions.

What questions to ask when interviewing a new CFO?

Martin Hurych

What I see is that a lot of people who are in charge of finance in a company are just looking for a colored Excel tells them where we are green, where we are orange and where we are red. But then the vast majority of them don't make any suggestions for solutions. If you were to bring a new CFO into your company today, what would you ask him or her in the interview process so that there's a good chance I won't hire an analyst, but will instead take on a true business partner?

Michal Belan

That's a good question, we deal with that quite often because we're still scaling our consulting side. Even

the software side is growing faster, the consulting side is still keeping some traction.

The most important thing is experience. You can't cheat finance by having someone come in and pretend that they've eaten up all the wisdom in the world when they haven't actually experienced anything. Many of the things behind the numbers - the stories, decisions and situations that have happened - need to be either experienced or at least understood from real-life cases.

Books can help a lot with this, but you need to know the stories behind the numbers - what happened, how people made decisions, where mistakes were made, what the triggers were, and how financial management helped support the company's success.

So the first thing I would : What is this person's experience working in finance roles, how has he or she worked with the board, with the CEO, and what decisions has he or she helped create?

Martin Hurych

Paradoxically, the interview is not so much about finances as it is about showing what was done with them in the company afterwards.

Michal Belan

I wouldn't put it quite like that. You're right for the most part, I would definitely give it the most weight, at the same time it's important to make it clear that a CFO is not just someone who can handle routine processes and manual work. Just because he produces a report doesn't make him a good CFO.

His main added value is that he can interpret the numbers, get to them as quickly as possible and have the biggest and most positive impact on the value of the company.

We're very technology-oriented - we want the data to be streamed so that no one has to fill something out manually. As soon as somebody pushes old-school approaches, i.e. putting everything into spreadsheets and filling it out manually, we probably wouldn't take it and we wouldn't be completely thrilled about it.

I consider the ideal approach to be, I set up this BI solution, the data flows in, these processes check it, and I get a ready-made basis for decision-making."

Martin Hurych

If, as part of the YouTube and Spotify skipping, people for some reason ignored everything we said all the time and happened to jump in here and you wanted to keep the highlights of this podcast and then print them in the bonus, what would they be?

Michal Belan

First of all, I would stress that cash flow forecasting is crucial throughout the life of a company,

especially at the beginning. Knowing what can happen in the next 3-6 months is always essential.

There is a statistic on the mortality rate of new companies that says that more than 50% of companies do not survive to their fifth year. From my own experience, I believe that the main reason they end is precisely because they are unable to plan or predict what will happen.

Then they're surprised, suddenly they don't have the money to pay themselves - and that's it.

Then you need to have a plan that makes sense from the start. The company will make sense one day, even if it doesn't make sense now, so it's important to plan every year. Every year it should be where the company is going and not just do things haphazardly.

That's probably why a lot of people wouldn't even start doing what they're doing to begin with - if they realized right away that in three years they'd be spending meaningless hours on something that doesn't make enough money and can't scale, they wouldn't even get into it. That's why you need regular planning, ideally at least once a year.

The third thing - once company exists (and this is true even for larger companies), it is necessary to have a finance department or at least an accountant who is responsive to the needs of the company. I may be "heating up the soup" a bit, but it's good to have a CFO from the start - or at least someone who understands finance and accounting data.

These are two different things - understanding finance and understanding accounting data are not always the same thing. If a person has a background in accounting or management accounting, he or she will be able to correct the whole process better and will also be able to evaluate whether the accounting is working properly or not.

Many companies lack a finance person and the accountant takes care of practically only VAT and payroll, which leads to the company being operationally blind.

What I would like to emphasize as the third key point is the need to have a finance team set up to regularly generated data each month that actually supports the company's operations.

In practice, it should not happen that the company is managed blindly for a whole quarter. If a plan and cash flow forecast is created, it should be a given that relevant data is generated every month so that no one has to manage the company by feel.

Martin Hurych

So we have the holy foursome, cash, plan, report and a capable CFO.

Michal Belan

I agree and would sign my name in my own blood.

Martin Hurych

Thank you so much and I wish you to grow, to grow like you have been growing double digits everywhere you can and thank you for visiting here.

Michal Belan

Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm glad I could be here.

(automatically transcribed by Beey.io , translated by DeepL.com, edited and shortened)