Business, Finance & Leadership
Long-form thinking on what it actually takes to run a healthy business — from someone who spent years on the other side of the credit desk.
Grow Without Growing Broke
A profitable company can grow itself broke. Here is how to build the capacity, protect the cash, and make growth a choice instead of a threat.
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Large Companies Close in Five Days. Your Small Company Should Too.
Large companies close faster because the work is owned, scheduled, and completed all month. Small companies can build the same discipline.
What Should Your Back Office Actually Look Like?
A practical matrix for matching bookkeeping, controllership, CPA support, and fractional or full-time CFO leadership to the business you are becoming.
The Ten Numbers That Decide Whether You Grow or Grind
An $8 million shop, fifteen years in business, a real backlog — and the owner can't tell you the gross margin on the job in front of him. Here's the fix.
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Buying a Business Is Easy. Surviving One Isn't.
There's a wave of content telling people to buy boring businesses. The opportunity may be real — but the financial illiteracy going in with a lot of these buyers isn't.
Don't Pay Sticker Price for a Business
Most small business acquisitions are priced off a multiple of earnings. That number is a starting point for a negotiation. It is not what the business is worth.
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You Can't Be Nordstrom and Walmart
The small businesses that try to be everything — competitive on price and exceptional on service — end up being neither. Pick your lane, then price to defend it.
What Your Banker Sees When You Walk In the Door
Most business owners think a loan decision comes down to profit. A banker is asking a different question: can this business cover debt if things go sideways?
You Can Outsource the Books. You Can't Outsource the Understanding.
I've met a lot of business owners who are proud of the fact that they don't look at their numbers. Here's what that actually costs them.
Do You Actually Know Where You Stand?
Most owners can tell you last year's profit. Fewer can tell you whether the business can survive a bad quarter. The balance sheet is the answer to that question.
When the Numbers You Trust Are Wrong
I review balance sheets before anything else. If it's not clean, you can't trust the rest of the financial picture. Here are the five errors I see most often.
Can You Survive a Bad Quarter?
There are dozens of ratios. You only need the ones that answer the real question: can this business survive a bad quarter and still pay its lenders?
Why Growing Companies Run Out of Cash
A business can be profitable on paper and still run out of cash. That gap lives on the balance sheet, not the income statement.
The Numbers Behind Every Big Decision
Good decisions are based on what your balance sheet is actually saying, not what you hope the numbers mean. This is how you use that statement as a tool.
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I Love It When a Plan Comes Together: Leadership Lessons from Hannibal Smith
Col. John 'Hannibal' Smith never ran a Fortune 500 company. He never sat through a two-day strategy offsite or delivered a board presentation. But somehow, week after week, he assembled a team of misfits, faced impossible odds, and pulled off results that no conventional playbook could have predicted. Sound familiar?
Rusty Griswold - The Steadiest Kid in the Station Wagon
Clark Griswold gets all the credit. Nobody talks about the kid in the backseat who watched his dad tie the dog to the bumper and drive away — and somehow stayed completely sane through all of it.
Cash Flow Is King, But Most Small Businesses Never Crown It
I've sat across the table from hundreds of small business owners who were confused about why their bank said no. Their income statement looked fine. Sales were up. They were profitable. So why was the line of credit being called?
What Bankers Actually Look At When You Apply for a Loan
The five Cs of credit are real, but they don't tell you what a banker is actually thinking when your loan package lands on their desk. Here's the unfiltered version, from someone who spent years on that side of the table.
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New articles published regularly.