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When revenue grows but cash tightens.
A services company increased revenue 22% in two quarters.
On paper, performance looked strong.
In reality, liquidity was tightening every month.
The issue wasn’t profitability.
It was timing.
• Receivables moved from 32 to 58 days
• Hiring decisions were made before cash conversion stabilized
• Variable revenue was funding fixed payroll
Every new contract increased short-term pressure.
Growth wasn’t the problem.
Cash structure was.
This pattern appears more often than founders expect.
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Episode 3 of my series: Your numbers should make sense.
If you're a founder, check these 5 numbers every month:
1️⃣ Cash in the bank: what you can actually spend today, not your profit.
2️⃣ Monthly burn and runway: how many months until you hit zero.
3️⃣ Gross margin: what's left of each dirham after direct costs. If it's shrinking, growth won't save you.
4️⃣ Money owed to you: unpaid invoices and how old they are. Profit on paper doesn't pay salaries.
5️⃣ Tax you haven't set aside: VAT collected isn't your money, and corporate tax is building on your profit. Know the number before the deadline does.
If your monthly numbers don't tell a clear story, that's not a finance problem. It's a visibility problem, and it's fixable.
Which of these five do you check the least? Tell me in the comments.
What an easy way to explain😍
Clean cash dashboard design
Buoy is a cash dashboard for finance teams. Every number is measured against one line: the least cash the company wants in the bank. Here, the weekly cash update: pick who gets it, add a line, send.
A concept I designed in Figma and built as a working prototype.
Case study: https://buoy-case-study.vercel.app
Crisp, clean, and effective.
Burying your traction on slide 28 is the fastest way to lose a venture partner.
Most founders assume volume equals expertise. They drop a massive rock of information onto venture partners, hoping the investor will dig through it to find a reason to write a check.
But reality works differently. Venture partners review materials on their phones in the back of a cab or between meetings.
If your core growth metric is hidden under a solid wall of text, nobody is going to see it. You lose their attention before they even understand your business model.
Your presentation should be a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
Cut your deck in half. Leave empty space so your most critical numbers can actually breathe. One clean layout proving your unit economics closes rounds much faster than ten pages of technical documentation and product features.
Open your current pitch deck. How many slides can you delete today without losing the core narrative?
The phone-in-a-cab test is a good one. A quick way to check it is to shrink each slide to thumbnail size: if the key number still reads there, it will survive a phone screen. Do you set a minimum size for metric callouts in your decks?