Bright Cellars: Accurate Cash Forecasting to Steer E-Commerce Growth

Bright Cellars is a direct-to-consumer wine subscription business, whose headquarters are located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The company was founded in 2014 by Richard Yau and Joe Laurendi. As of 2023, Bright Cellars has about 20 employees and 15 million US dollars in revenue. Bright Cellars is in a difficult position to fundraise right now. Read here how the company's CFO goes about doing this this with the use of Agicap's cashflow forecasting.

Growth is good, but needs to be controlled

The current economic environment has placed more scrutiny on businesses when it comes to their cash position. As Kim Borsheim, CFO of Bright Cellars explains it, growth has to be very controlled and very important to ensure that the company has the right run rate as the business is growing and enough cash in the bank to get to the next fundraise round. According to Kim Borsheim. the SVB crash has put more scrutiny on businesses to place more diversification around their cash management solutions.

This is also the challenge for an inventive e-commerce business such as Bright Cellars. The online wine subscription service offers its customers a quiz which has nothing to do with wine. Yet based on the answers, Bright Cellars is able to pinpoint the taste of their clients and match it to the best wine, which is then monthly packaged for delivery right to the door. The company started out initially as a venture-backed company and has since relied upon numerous fundraising rounds to secure its cash position. Kim Borsheim, who used to work for KPMG in the audit practice for several years, focusing mainly on consumer and industrial, manufacturing and retail clients, recommends: “The CFO should be absolutely well aware of the cash position of the business, so that they can enable and support the CEO’s vision on growth or whatever it might be.”

Excel used to be sufficient, but not anymore

Kim Borsheim knows that most CFOs are going to use Excel as the cash flow forecasting and management tool first. Excel has its place in cash flow management, she agrees, but if you could have a tool like Agicap to rely on instead, “it’s a much, much stronger, much more intuitive tool to utilize for cash flow forecasting and management”, according to Borsheim.

In the US, for a long time, there was no cash flow management or cash flow forecasting software that suits the needs of a small business or a venture-backed business. Actually, Kim Borsheim had been looking for a cash flow forecasting software for Bright Cellars for about five years before she came across Agicap in the US market.

Why Bright Cellars chose Agicap to forecast cash positions

Bright Cellars chose to use Agicap to reduce their time spent on updating their cash flow model and to increase their visibility for the future. Agicap makes it much easier for Kim Borsheim to share her cash flow forecast across the company and give visibility to others within the company and even outside with the board of directors.

If she had to describe Agicap in three words, Kim Borsheim, CFO of Bright Cellars, would say: “Flexible, intuitive and reliable.”