Welcome to a new series of articles for Startups Magazine. Over the next few months I would like to invite you to accompany me on a journey; a journey that many readers will already have started and many others will be contemplating. For those that have already started the journey then I hope that they will still find some of my words useful, and for those yet to start then I trust that this series will make navigation so much easier.

Have you ever thought of setting up your own business? Have you already done so? What made you want to do this? In truth, the answers are very different for each of us but, looking at government statistics and Companies House records, more and more people are choosing this route; especially since the turmoil in the last few years caused by the pandemic.

For anyone starting a business there is that delicious and intoxicating mixture of excitement tinged with fear. Both these are driven by stepping into the unknown and doing something new. Doing anything new or different will always present new challenges, and the further outside of your personal experience or comfort zone any new enterprise is, then potentially the larger those challenges will be.

This article could have been entitled ‘data and financials’ but so many of you would not have got even this far.  But the truth is that data and your financials are not just numbers, as without a clear understanding of both of these then nothing else stands much of a chance.  Data needs to be properly collected and analysed, and any assumptions and financial forecasts are then driven from this data.