Someone is financing your growth. The question is who
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 that out loud.
Finance is one of six areas that decide what a company is worth. It is also the one most often mistaken for fundraising.
Growth is paid for before it pays you back
You hire before the work exists. You buy material before the order is delivered. You deliver before you invoice. You invoice before you are paid.
Between the first payment out and the last payment in sits a gap, and somebody has to cover it. That somebody is your company. Every additional order widens the gap slightly, which is why a company can grow itself into a cash problem while every single order is profitable.
This is the part that surprises owners most. Profit and cash are not the same thing, and only one of them pays your salaries in March.
Who finances your growth
There are only three answers, and most owners have never chosen between them deliberately.
Your customers. Advance payments, staged payments, retainers, subscriptions, contracts with a term. When customers fund the gap, growth costs you almost nothing and a buyer notices immediately.
Your bank. Credit lines and loans. Available, visible, and priced. It works until the bank changes its view of your sector, which it does without asking you.
You. Profits you never took out, a private loan, a personal guarantee, a salary you skipped. This is the most common and the least visible of the three, and it is the one that quietly moves risk from the company to the owner.
We have learned to ask this early, because the answer explains more about a company than the profit line does.
What a buyer sees here
A buyer is not only asking what the company earns. He is asking how much cash he has to put in after he owns it.
A company that finances its own growth from its customers is worth more than an identical company that finances it from a credit line. Same revenue, same margin, different answer to the only question that matters after closing: how much more money does this need before it pays me.
What actually changes it
Know what growth costs you. How many days pass between paying for a job and being paid for it. Most owners have never calculated this number, and it is usually longer than they guess by a factor of two.
Move the moment of payment. Advance payments, staged invoicing, shorter terms, contracts with a duration. This is a commercial decision, not an accounting one, and it changes the company's value more reliably than a price increase.
Separate the cost base that grows with revenue from the one that does not. Owners who know this can say what doubling the business would actually require. Owners who do not know it find out during the doubling, at the worst possible moment.
We worked with a growth company whose investor became insolvent. The business itself was sound, the processes were not, and every additional order made the cash situation worse. We digitised the order and invoicing processes, moved the customer base onto contracts with a term, and rebuilt the ownership structure. Revenue went from 500,000 to 1.5 million within twelve months. The more useful outcome was that the growth no longer had to be paid for in advance by anybody.
Three questions worth answering tonight
Write the answers down. The exercise only works if you are specific.
How many days pass between your first payment for a job and the customer's payment to you?
If revenue doubled next year, how much cash would you need before the first additional payment arrives?
Which part of your cost base grows with revenue, and which part stays where it is?
One more question
If your revenue doubled next year, would your account be fuller or emptier in month six?
Most owners answer fuller. In the companies we have worked with, it is usually emptier.
From Assessment to Execution
1) A conversation. Thirty minutes, no cost, no deck. You describe the situation, we tell you which of the six is setting your number and whether we are the right people for it.
2) A positioning workshop. Half a day to a full day, CHF 3'950 fixed. You leave with the decisions that move your value, not with a report.
3) Then, if it makes sense for both sides, we stay. A retainer built on the findings, not on a standard package.
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