Harbor & Pine Advisory (Demo)
Dana Whitfield · Demo room · Fractional CFO & Advisory
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Blog: 3 numbers to check on Friday
3 Numbers Every Small Business Owner Should Check on Friday Most owners I work with aren't short on data. Their software spits out dozens of reports. What they're missing is a short list of numbers worth checking every week, so here's mine. Cash runway If no new money came in, how many weeks could you keep operating? This decides whether you can say yes to an opportunity or need to wait. Gross margin by service Some of what you sell costs a lot more to deliver than you think. Most owners are surprised when they see which service is actually paying the bills. Days to get paid The average time between sending an invoice and seeing the money. When it starts creeping up, a cash crunch usually follows about a month later. If three feels like a lot, start with cash runway. Check it every Friday for a month and see whether it changes any of your decisions. For most of my clients, it does. [Demo post. The full article continues in the live version.]
The million-dollar stress call
A client called me last month to tell me she'd crossed a million in revenue for the first time. About five minutes later she admitted she'd never been this stressed. Revenue was up around 30%. Profit was down. She'd hired two people before the work was there, and she'd priced her new clients the same as her old ones even though they needed a lot more of her time. None of that shows up on the revenue line, so it's a risky number to celebrate on its own. I asked her: if you doubled tomorrow, would you make twice as much, or just have twice as much to manage? We spent the rest of the hour on that.
The first question I ask
When I start with a new client, I ask one question before we look at anything else: if no new money came in, how many weeks could you keep going? Most people guess. A lot of them guess high. The answer changes what we do on Monday. Under a month, we pause new spending and go after what's owed. One to three months, there's room to plan, carefully. Past three months, you can probably afford to try the thing you've been sitting on. I like it because you can work it out on the back of an envelope. Do you know yours?
The year I didn't look at my own numbers
The first year I ran my own firm, I went five months without opening my own books. I knew how. I did it for clients all day. I just didn't want to see what mine said, so I kept putting it off. When I finally sat down with them on a Sunday in March, everything was fine. Honestly, kind of boring. And I'd spent five months making calls about hiring and pricing on a hunch when the answer was in a file I could have opened in twenty minutes. I think about that every time a new client tells me they've been "meaning to look." Is there a file you've been putting off?
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