Adam HOEKSEMA: Co-Founder at ProjectionHub

Tell us something about yourself, your background:

I graduated with a degree in accounting in 2010 and immediately started my career at a small business incubator that was just starting a Small Business Administration microloan program. My role was to launch and grow the microloan program throughout Indiana. Over the next decade I served as the Executive Director of the organization, Bankable, and helped close over 1,500 loans totalling over $50 million. It was with this background that I started ProjectionHub.

Tell us about your venture with a brief explanation:

ProjectionHub – We help entrepreneurs create financial projections for investors, lenders and internal planning. We offer a library of 50+ CPA prepared financial projection spreadsheet templates, a financial projection software tool, and custom financial modelling services.

How/Why did you start as an entrepreneur? What set you off?

I became interested in entrepreneurship while in undergrad at Taylor University. My freshman year I decided to compete in a business plan competition and ended up winning the top undergraduate award along with some seed money for my business. That particular business idea never got off the ground, but the experience helped me fall in love with entrepreneurship.

From there I launched two other businesses in 2010 and 2011 before starting ProjectionHub in 2012.

Many small business lenders ask loan applicants to provide financial projections. So in 2012 while I was working on my personal taxes, using TurboTax, I thought there must be a TurboTax-like solution for small businesses to create financial projections. Since I couldn’t find anything, I called my brother, a software engineer, and asked if he wanted to help me build a solution. With that, ProjectionHub was born.

Tell us a bit more about your venture:

In 2012, we built a web based SaaS tool to help entrepreneurs create financial projections. Our goal was to build a SaaS business with a monthly recurring revenue stream, but after 6 years of fighting this fight it became clear that we simply did not have product market fit. Our customers did not want to subscribe to a monthly software for projections. They needed projections for a single event like applying for a business loan or raising capital from investors, and they wanted to pay a one time fee, not an ongoing fee for financial projections.

So, in 2019 we hired a CPA to help our clients create custom financial models based in Excel. As Grace worked on these custom models she also built financial projection templates for over 50 specific industries that we could sell individually. Fast forward to the end of 2021 and our financial projection template business is now our largest source of revenue.