Forecasting the Future: Business Practices and financial forecasting for a growing WordPress business

This is a business focused track, but built for freelancers and developers, alike. We didn’t start our firm with anything but our team and time.

This talk discusses actionable items and financial practices that you can do on a daily basis to better run your WordPress plugin, theme or consulting business.

In this talk I will discuss:
-How our firm used the “free downloads metric” to monitor paid growth in year 1 of Startup (we are now in year 3 of GiveWP.com)
-How we used financial projecting to grow from 4-8 employees with no outside investors
-Planning our internal “hours as dollars” against Code base assets and COG expenses
-Using Cash Flow projections rolling three months to plan for product development cycle budgets
-Budgeting marketing, quarterly without understanding future sales
-Release learnings vs. free and vs. paid and how our projecting formulas change as our business matures
-Projecting renewals

Finance might seem boring. This talk won’t be.

Takeaways:

  • How to setup and work against your planned budget
  • How to project based on outside variables that you can and cannot control
  • A different view of finance–how it can be fun and playful, not boring.

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