BLOG

Most owners can tell you last month's revenue from memory. Very few can tell you what last month's growth cost them in cash. That is not carelessness. Revenue is visible. It arrives, it gets reported, it feels like progress. Capital is invisible until it is missing. We have sat with owners whose order book had never been better and whose account was emptier every month. Nothing was wrong with the business. The growth was being financed by the owner, and nobody had ever said t

Most owners find out what their company is worth at the worst possible moment. A buyer sends an indication. A bank asks for a valuation before extending the facility. A co-shareholder wants out and needs a number. Suddenly the number exists, and it is rarely the number the owner had in his head. The gap between those two numbers is almost never a matter of opinion. It is the accumulated result of decisions taken over ten or fifteen years. Most of them were sensible at the tim