A small business owner with a plight

This is my third startup, my fourth if I count launching an incubator for seed stage companies.

I've been doing startups or mentoring entrepreneurs and small business owners for over ten years now. One of the biggest problems I encountered with my first startup seems to continue. I could get my hands on pages and pages of financial reports but the key numbers I needed to know in order to feel like I was making decent decisions didn't jump off the page.

Of course today the problem is aggravated by my aging eyes. The many rows and columns of numbers that show up in a typical financial report from a typical accounting package are even more of a blur than they were my first time out.

What I wanted then and want now is a few key numbers that literally leap off the page at me. My cash on hand is . . . (scary at the moment) and I have "n" months left before we go out of business. It would be great to see how my revenue growth or lack of growth is trending. Even greater to be able to compare some of my numbers to, say, the average of such a number from my peer community.

In a very real sense, the idea behind Lumeno.us springs from frustrations I and some of my favorite colleagues and clients have faced. We make too many decisions in a vacuum.

How we will fix that will become more apparent in the coming months. And you can bet I'll be the very first user of our service.