I’ve seen this a few times now: a business with a great P&L goes under because they run out of cash.

Poor cash management. Too much inventory. Expenses that have nothing to do with generating revenue.

Whatever it is, the cash is gone before the revenue comes in. That’s when the administrators walk in the door.

Manage your cash flow, folks. When you have positive cash flow you can screw up just about everything else in your business and still survive.

Softwarestan: “We have a saying, ‘Move fast and break things.’ The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.”

Hardwarestan: “Measure twice, cut once.”

Choices.

I’ve spent two decades working inside and alongside small and mid sized businesses across a range of industries.

The pattern is consistent. The businesses that recover and grow aren’t the ones with the best product or the most capital. They’re the ones that stop ignoring what they already have.

Our work sits at that intersection.

We help business owners and leadership teams identify where value is being lost, and build the systems to recover it.

Your chances of making the sale improve when you offer your prospect:

1. A quality product
2. That does what they want it to do
3. At a price they can afford to pay.

Tick these 3 boxes, you’ll do okay.

How to get your business back on track.

This: Attention + consistent effort + time.

Want new stuff? Want it today? Want it easy? That’s 99% of people.

But that’s not you, is it? You’re a 1%er.

The 1%ers know there’s no shortcut. They do the work. Even when the payoff isn’t immediate. They keep their focus on the few things that matter.

Cash velocity matters.

If you manufacture to order (MTO), your costs accumulate but you don’t get paid until it’s delivered.

If you manufacture to stock (MTS) those finished items just sit on your shelves, waiting for a buyer.

You wear all those costs until someone pays you.

Maybe you have the working capital to cover them. But if you don’t, it’s painful.

You compromise, you lie, you discount. Anything to get that money into your bank account.

Hell of a way to run a business.

Think about cash velocity. What can you change to shorten the time between manufacture and sale?

The businesses Stratify helps look great from the outside. Strong P&L and balance sheet, sales every month, happy employees, feared by their competitors.

Rainbows and unicorns, right?

But behind the curtain they’re declining, slowly, day by day.

They’re drifting away from what made then strong in the first place. Their trajectory goes from growth, to flatline, to slow decline, to administration.

Fortunately it’s reversible – if it gets caught soon enough.

Fear, uncertainty, doubt. They don’t announce themselves the way they did when you started your dream business.

They go quiet and structural.

They become the reasons you haven’t raised your prices in two years.