Cash Flow Forecasting Quotes

Enron followed the unwise practice of paying bonuses based on forecasted profits, not actual cash flows, a system that posed a problem remarkably similar to the R&D issues Gluck and his colleagues had solved at Northern Electric years earlier. In short: You can forecast anything. Delivering actual results is a different story. The emphasis on forecasts also neutralized Enron’s so-called risk-management group, which became a shrinking violet in the face of ever more outrageous estimates.

The only thing that we know about financial predictions of startups is that 100 percent of them are wrong. If you can predict the future accurately, we have a few suggestions for other things you could be doing besides starting a risky early stage company. Furthermore, the earlier stage the startup, the less accurate any predications will be. While we know you can't predict your revenue with any degree of accuracy (although we are always very pleased in that rare case where revenue starts earlier and grows faster than expected), the expense side of your financial plan is very instructive as to how you think about the business. You can't predict your revenue with any level of precision, but you should be able to manage your expenses exactly to plan. Your financials will mean different things to different investors. In our case, we focus on two things: (1) the assumptions underlying the revenue forecast (which we don't need a spreadsheet for—we'd rather just talk about them) and (2) the monthly burn rate or cash consumption of the business. Since your revenue forecast will be wrong, your cash flow forecast will be wrong. However, if you are an effective manager, you'll know how to budget for this by focusing on lagging your increase in cash spend behind your expected growth in revenue.

There are four basic inputs that we need for a value estimate: cash flows from existing assets (net of reinvestment needs and taxes), expected growth in these cash flows for a forecast period, the cost of financing the assets, and an estimate of what the firm will be worth at the end of the forecast period. Each of these inputs can be defined either from the perspective of the firm or just from the perspective of the equity investors.

Your best estimates for the future will not match up to the actual numbers for several reasons. First, even if your information sources are impeccable, you must convert raw information into forecasts, and any mistakes that you make at this stage will cause estimation error. Next, the path that you envision for a firm can prove to be hopelessly off. The firm may do much better or much worse than you expected it to perform, and the resulting earnings and cash flows will be different from your estimates; consider this firm-specific uncertainty. When valuing Cisco in 2001, for instance, we seriously underestimated how difficult it would be for the company to maintain its acquisition-driven growth in the future, and we overvalued the company as a consequence. Finally, even if a firm evolves exactly the way you expected it to, the macroeconomic environment can change in unpredictable ways. Interest rates can go up or down, and the economy can do much better or worse than expected. Our valuation of Marriott from November 2019 looks hopelessly optimistic, in hindsight, because we did not foresee the global pandemic in 2020 and the economic consequences for the hospitality business.