Where this usually shows up.
Cashflow trouble is rarely loud. It shows up as a quiet, recurring sense that the numbers aren’t behaving the way the work suggests they should. When owners come to us, it’s almost always one of these:
- Revenue is up, the bank balance is down, and you can’t explain why.
- August payroll is the one you quietly worry about every year.
- Receivables aging keeps drifting and nobody’s job is to chase it.
- You learned about a cash problem from your bookkeeper, ninety days late.
If two of those are true, you’re not alone, and you’re not behind. About half of US small businesses hold less than a month of cash buffer at any given time. The squeeze is structural. The question is whether you can see it ninety days out or only the week it lands.
The Thursday number, not the revenue number.
Most owner-operators run their week off the wrong dashboard. Revenue is the headline. The check that has to clear on Thursday is the actual constraint. The two numbers diverge most violently in growth quarters — exactly when everything else looks like it’s going right.
Our cashflow coaching starts here: figuring out what the Thursday number actually is for your business, where it gets eaten between the work and the bank account, and how to see it earlier than you currently do. By the time the bank balance makes a problem visible, the problem has usually been happening for about three months. The work is moving that visibility window forward — from the week it lands to the quarter before.
How we work on it.
Most cashflow engagements run six to twelve sessions over three to six months. Maya Ortiz-Hughes leads this pillar. Before coaching, she ran a 22-person residential contracting firm for eleven years and almost missed an August payroll in her best revenue year — which is why this is the work she does now.
A typical engagement looks like this:
- First two sessions. Map the actual cash cycle of your business. Not the theoretical one. The one with the supplier who quietly cut your terms back to thirty days in March.
- Middle stretch. Build a weekly rhythm — five lines, ten minutes, every Thursday — that the owner can run without the bookkeeper in the room.
- Closing sessions. Stress-test next year’s Q3 against this year’s mistakes, and lock in the one or two structural changes that keep the squeeze from coming back.
The deliverable isn’t a binder. It’s a habit — and a much shorter list of things you have to think about on Sunday night.
After missing two payroll Thursdays in fourteen months, an Ohio commercial plumbing firm came to us with a profitable P&L and a falling bank balance — and no idea how to square the two.
We mapped the cash cycle, set up a five-line weekly dashboard, and repriced their service contracts on a ninety-day notice. They made every payroll for the next eighteen months and stopped checking the bank balance on Sunday nights.
"I'd read every business book on the shelf and still couldn't figure out why my best year was also my worst cash year. Maya drew the cycle on a napkin in twelve minutes. I've been sleeping through Q3 ever since." — Dana W., owner
Is this for you?
Most of our cashflow work has been with service businesses, contractors, light manufacturers, and small distributors — businesses where the cycle between work-done and money-in is long enough to hurt. If you run a cash-register business with very short cycles, the dynamics are different, and we’ll say that on the call rather than pretend otherwise.
The work scales between five and fifty people, but it changes shape along the way. At five, you’re the dashboard. At fifty, you need a rhythm the bookkeeper and the office manager can run without you in the room. Tell us where you actually are and we’ll be specific about what’s relevant.
If you’re inside an active cash crunch this week, the honest first move is sometimes a banker, not a coach. We’ll tell you which on the call. Coaching isn’t free, and it isn’t the right move for every business this quarter — we’d rather say that than sell you something you don’t need.
On price: engagements vary by size and scope. We share specifics on the intro call, once we understand the shape of the work — usually within the first ten minutes.