If you’re running a growing business and cash always feels tighter than it should……there’s a reason.
And it’s rarely sales.
Most CEOs I speak with are sitting on at least $250k in trapped cash or profit inside their business right now….they just can’t see it. Not because they’re careless. Not because they’re bad operators. But because growth hides inefficiency incredibly well.
Revenue masks problems……until it doesn’t.
The uncomfortable truth
As businesses scale past $4m–$10m in revenue, complexity grows faster than financial visibility.
More people……more customers……more systems……more decisions.
Yet the finance function often stays fundamentally the same.
Reports arrive late. Numbers don’t quite reconcile. Margins feel thinner, but no one can explain why.
Cash flow is unpredictable, even in “good” months.
So CEOs do what they have to do……they rely on instinct.
That works — until it becomes expensive.
Where cash really gets trapped
Hidden cash doesn’t sit in one place. It leaks quietly across the business:
Margins that erode job by job, customer by customer
Pricing that hasn’t kept pace with cost and complexity
Debtors that stretch just enough to strain cash flow
Unprofitable work that looks busy but delivers little return
Decisions delayed because the numbers aren’t trusted
Individually, none of these feel fatal.
Together……they quietly drain hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
And because the reports don’t clearly surface the issue, the problem becomes normalised.
That’s the real danger.
Why most CEOs miss it
This isn’t a bookkeeping issue. And it’s not solved with “better reports”.
The real issue is lack of senior financial leadership.
Bookkeepers record the past. Accountants ensure compliance.
Neither owns the commercial truth of the business.
Without CFO-level thinking embedded into day-to-day decision-making, financial data stays backward-looking and disconnected from action.
You don’t need more spreadsheets……you need decision-ready clarity.
What changes when cash clarity exists
When hidden cash is exposed, everything shifts:
Decisions speed up
Pricing becomes intentional
Unprofitable work gets cut or fixed
Cash flow stabilises
Confidence replaces second-guessing
Most importantly……growth stops feeling risky.
This is why well-run businesses don’t “hope” their numbers are right…..they know.
How this shows up in the first 90 days
When senior financial leadership is embedded properly, the first few months are revealing:
Margin leakage becomes visible
Cash constraints are explained, not guessed
Reporting shifts from historical to forward-looking
Leadership conversations move from “What happened?” to “What do we do next?”
That’s where trapped cash gets released…..not through cost-cutting panic, but through clarity and control.
The real question
If you’re leading a $4m–$15m business and you can’t clearly point to where an extra $250k of cash or profit would come from in the next 12 months……that’s not a confidence issue.
That’s a visibility issue.
And visibility problems compound quickly as the business grows.
What to do next
If this feels uncomfortably familiar……that’s usually a signal worth paying attention to.
👉 Speak with Rob at Growbiz
A calm, strategic conversation to pinpoint where cash and margin are being lost….and what to do next
Because knowing where the $250k is hiding changes everything.
