GrowthForge: Field Notes #2

One of the more confusing moments for a business owner is realising that the numbers look fine, and yet the bank balance doesn’t.

Revenue is up on last year. Margins are acceptable. The accountant isn’t alarmed. And still, there’s a sense of constraint that doesn’t quite line up with the story the P&L is telling.

Bills take more attention than they used to. Timing matters more. Decisions feel heavier because every commitment seems to tighten something else. It’s not a crisis, but it’s uncomfortable.

What makes it harder is that it feels unjustified. The business appears to be doing the right things, and yet cash never seems to settle.

When this shows up, most owners assume it’s a temporary mismatch.

A timing issue. A growth phase. Something that will smooth out once the next few jobs land or once revenue pulls a little further ahead.

That assumption makes sense. We’re taught to read profit as success, and success is supposed to bring breathing room.

So the response is usually to push through. Stay optimistic. Focus on sales. Trust that scale will take care of it.

Sometimes it does. Often, it doesn’t.

What’s usually happening is quieter and less obvious.

As a business grows, cash stops behaving the way it did when things were smaller. Payment terms stretch. Inventory builds. Work in progress expands. Small decisions that once felt harmless begin to accumulate.

Profit still shows up on paper, but cash is being asked to carry more weight across more places at once.

None of this is dramatic in isolation. Together, it changes the physics of the business. Cash becomes less forgiving, and surprises start to appear where there used to be slack.

This is rarely about discipline or intelligence. It’s about whether the system the business is operating inside was ever designed for the level of activity it’s now carrying.

There’s usually a moment when the owner realises they’re thinking about cash more than they ever expected to at this stage.

Not in a panicked way, but in a persistent one. Decisions are filtered through “what does this do to cash?” rather than “is this the right move?”. Opportunities feel heavier because they come with financial drag attached.

The business hasn’t failed. It’s just become more fragile than it looks.

That’s often when anxiety creeps in, not because things are bad, but because they don’t behave the way the numbers suggest they should.

The default response is to chase volume.

More work. More turnover. More activity to outrun the discomfort.

The problem is that volume usually increases the very pressures that are already straining cash. More stock. More debtors. More complexity. More working capital tied up in motion.

Teams feel this too. Being asked to sell more when cash already feels tight can create resistance, even if no one says it out loud. Effort starts to feel misdirected.

At that point, cash stress stops being a financial issue and becomes an emotional one.

The businesses that regain control rarely do anything heroic.

They slow down just enough to understand how cash actually moves through the business, rather than how they assume it does. They look at timing, sequencing, and exposure. They reduce surprises before they chase growth.

This isn’t about becoming conservative. It’s about becoming deliberate.

Once cash behaviour is understood and designed for, growth stops feeling like a gamble and starts to feel like a choice again.

This pattern is one of the reasons GrowthForge exists.

Over time, it became clear to me that cash problems in growing businesses are rarely solved by motivation, optimism, or revenue targets alone. They’re solved by designing systems that respect how cash actually behaves under load.

GrowthForge treats cash not as a scorecard, but as a system that needs to be understood and sequenced properly before further acceleration makes sense.

That lens changes the conversation completely.

If a business is profitable but cash still feels tight, it’s worth pausing before assuming the answer is “more”.

Sometimes the more useful question is whether the business has outgrown the way cash is currently managed and understood.

If that feels familiar and you’d like to talk it through, you’re welcome to book a short exploratory conversation.