Project: Liftoff

When my clients get their financial projections, they tend to be very happy. Also, if they are coaching clients who did the projections themselves, proud. And then they find out that they need to distribute those financials, and that means printing them out, and then the romance ends. Because it’s not obvious how to print a spreadsheet in Excel in a useful way. For the experts, that’s probably because Excel is mostly an on-screen tool: they fool around with sums in it, e-mail spreadsheets back and forth, and change each others’ figures. For the new-to-Excel, well, it’s a somewhat intimidating program (VLOOKUP anyone?) and, worse, the financial projections are themselves vastly intimidating. As a result, most people spend very little time trying to print Excel spreadsheets. Until the day before their big investor meeting; then they need four perfect copies. This is how you get your perfect printouts of your Excel spreadsheet.. Here you see my standard pro forma income statement template. At the top are 36 months of month-by-month data, below are the three year-by-year roll-ups. We want one page for each year, plus the three-year roll-ups all on one page. First, go to Page Break Preview mode. In Page Setup – or on the Page Setup ribbon in recent versions of Excel – set the document to be 3 pages wide by 2 high, all landscape orientation. Now, drag the vertical dashed blue lines representing page breaks to after months 12 and 24. Drag the horizontal one below the 36-month projections. Go to Page Setup. Set the A column – or wherever you put your row titles – to repeat on all pages. The months and years at the top will take care of themselves. Set it to print over, then down, so that the three years of monthly projections end up in order. And print away. That’s all there is to it. You’ll end up with readable print-outs. (If there are too many rows to fit on one sheet vertically, try hiding unimportant ones. Just make sure you keep every line that totals up other lines, so that the financials make sense.)

Did you have fun this week celebrating Cinco de Mayo? I did – we had great, authentic Mexican food from one of our favorite nearby places. (One thing about LA: it’s filled with awesome Mexican food.) Turns out that Cinco de Mayo , while it’s a fun holiday, isn’t a very important one – it’s just one important battle in the history of Mexico. But that one victory in battle has turned out to be a big celebration worldwide. Running your own small business or start-up is a life filled with battles, most of them pretty unimportant. Every day, you’ve got to make your calls and e-mails. Every week, you have to get out there and network. Every month, you have to balance your Quickbooks. And then you have to do it all again. That’s why entrepreneurs tend to be bad at celebrating the little victories. We put our heads down, knock things off our to-do list, and go back to it. Rarely do we say “hey, that was awesome,” and when we do, we usually are still focused on the end goal, rather than the step we just pulled off. And, of course, when you’re starting or building a company, every end goal leads to another set of goals that you want to achieve to grow. We’re always looking to the big win in the end, not to what’s in our faces. So we don’t celebrate what we do get done, and that can be tough on the soul. Growing our businesses can be enough of an uphill climb that keeping our eyes only on the summit will actually drag us down. At the very least, it’ll keep us from enjoying the journey there. Cinco de Mayo celebrates the battle of Puebla, during the French Intervention in Mexico. But Puebla would never have been fought if not for the battle of Camerone, six days earlier. This battle is widely celebrated not by the Mexican nation but by the French Foreign Legion. At Camerone, a unit of the Foreign Legion held out long enough for a supply caravan to get to the French army at Puebla – but the Foreign Legion unit was wiped out. Yet the Foreign Legion celebrates the battle every year, because they fought bravely and well. Take a lesson from the Mexicans and the French both – celebrate both your small victories and your valiant failures. Building a business, there’s enough of both, and the celebration will make your life, and the journey to your goals, that much richer.