It’s Tim here, the founder of Clear Books.

As you know we recently became a public limited company. We did that so that we could ask you, our customers (and the general public), to consider becoming a part-owner of our company.

Our Cloud Funding share offer launched today, 23 September, and we were really pleased to get coverage in the FT.

For all the details about the Share Offer please visit:

http://www.clearbooks.co.uk/cloudfunding

Please leave any questions or comments you have for me.

 

Posted by Tim Fouracre

Tim founded Clear Books in 2008. Like many small business owners he worked from home for 15 months to get his startup off the ground. Today Tim enjoys helping Clear Books, its customers and its growing team innovate and achieve. Tim did his GCE O Levels in Ghana.

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4 Comments

  1. Tim Fouracre 23rd September 2013 at 11:40 am

    Great questions Justin – thank you for taking the time to comment.

    Xero is a public limited company so information is in the public domain and is accessible for all to research. There are UK based cloud accounting applications, namely FreeAgent and KashFlow. However, as private companies details such as strategy and financial performance are not in the public domain.

    The shares on offer are ordinary shares with exactly the same rights that existing shareholders have as outlined in the Articles of Association. We have not created one class of shares for existing shareholders and a different class for new shareholders. All shareholders have the same rights subject to additional rights as a result of percentage shareholdings as outlined on http://www.shareholderrights.co.uk.

    We do intend to expand the board but we want to make sure we get the right people. We will consider the idea of a non-exec minority shareholder representative as there is merit in the idea. However, we would look for them to add skills and experience to the board as well rather than simply to be there as a proxy for minority shareholders. This is consistent with the way companies operate and the law requiring directors to take into account all relevant considerations for the success of the company not simply the views of a certain group of people. i.e. directors are not representatives they are legally required to act in the interests of the
    company.

    In terms of the valuation Xero is a key benchmark. The valuation multiple is on historic revenue whereas our revenue run rate now exceeds £60,000 as outlined in the Share Information Document. Therefore on projected revenue from our current base the valuation multiple will be different. It’s worth pointing out that with EIS relief it is possible to get a 30% discount on the cost of the shares acquired which effectively discounts the valuation by 30%.

  2. Tim Fouracre 24th September 2013 at 9:26 am

    Please have a read of the Territory section of the Share Information document on p.46 http://www.clearbooks.co.uk/cloudfunding

  3. Tim Fouracre 24th September 2013 at 9:27 am

    Hi Richard,

    I have received some similar questions via email and am collating them all to do a couple of blog posts on each key topic that has come up. I will address your points as part of that.

    Thanks for the comments.

    Tim

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