Last week it was words, this week it’s numbers. I’m buried in spreadsheets. Cashflows, P&Ls. All that good stuff.

We’re meeting investors next week, you see. Having just bought a big thing, while setting up an even bigger thing, based on the first thing, my bank manager is looking a little nervous. It is Christmas after all. And so, to keep him happy, we’re doing a reasonably low-key fundraising thing to raise extra capital to allow the new business to grow at the rate it’s going to have to.

So here I am, tapping away, tweaking graphs, doing sums and using acronyms like EBIT and CPC. In different paragraphs, obviously. And do you know what occurred to me as I was doing it…? That I was doing exactly the same thing this time last year, getting ready for TFP’s public offering.

And do you know what occurred to me next? That the year before that I was doing exactly the same thing as we were negotiating first round investment. So this is my third Christmas of spreadsheets and fundraising.

And yet, somehow it gets a bit easier every time. There’s a cliche that it’s easier to get investment for a second business - and that certainly seems to be true (within two days of the press release going out, and despite me still not having officially announced what the new business is, I’d had three calls from people offering to either invest themselves or to put me in touch with people who would. Simple as that.)

But what’s more noticeable is the fact that I actually know what to do this time. This time two years ago I didn’t really know what a business plan looked like, outside my A Level business studies textbooks (which, helpfully taught me more about the Japanese principle of Kaisan and Maslow’s fucking hierarchy of fucking needs). This time two years ago I only had the vaguest idea of the difference between a P&L and cashflow. And this time two years ago, my negotiation technique was to simply sit quietly and pray I wasn’t being fucked over.

So, yes, exciting times. Very exciting indeed.

There’s just one slight downside. I found a photo of me taken two years ago. The Guardian took it for something - I forget what. I look about ten years younger. Seriously. Properly fresh faced. Wide-eyed even. I remember Michael once joking that he was starting to go grey because of the stress of starting a business. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

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