Every founder or CEO of a growing business remembers a month like this.
- Sales land
- Cash comes in
- The bank balance jumps
You log into your bank account and see the number. Suddenly the birds are singing, the coffee smells great and there is a spring in your step.
Everything feels aligned:
- the business is working
- the effort is paying off
- the numbers are confirming it
- life is good
In all of this, there is a moment that is easy to miss.
It is the point where you should stop and ask:
“If I go ahead with this next decision, what happens to my cash?”
But you don’t pause, you keep going with the momentum you are feeling. (More on what that pause looks like.)
You start thinking about what’s next:
- we should hire that person
- let’s push marketing harder
- we can invest a bit more now
Nothing unreasonable, just going with that momentum.
A quick thought experiment
Think about your last really good month.
The kind where:
- cash came in
- things felt easier
- the pressure lifted a bit
Can you think of a decision you made in that moment? Did you feel more confident making it?
This is how founders and business owners we work with describe it.
When cash is coming in, it feels like proof the business is working. This makes it easier to decide what comes next.
What that month is actually telling you
It can feel like the business has improved. In many cases though, nothing fundamentally changed:
- pricing stayed the same
- margins did not improve
- no major efficiencies were introduced
Something did shift though, just not in the business itself. The shift was how it made you feel.
The good month gave you confidence, and confidence changes how you move.
- you stop hesitating
- you move a little faster
- you say yes a bit more easily
Nothing extreme, just with less friction. This is the part that is easy to miss.
Nothing in that moment tells you to slow down. There is no clear marker that makes you stop and ask:
“If I keep going like this, what happens next?”
Instead you keep going with the momentum and you make the decision.
What happens after that
A few weeks pass. The business is still busy and work is getting done. Something, though, feels different.
You check the bank account and the number is lower than you expected. Not dramatically, but enough to make you pause.
“We were doing well. Weren’t we?”
That feeling of forward momentum shifts and you start to adjust:
- holding off on something you were about to do
- pushing a payment out
- taking a closer look at what is coming in
You try and make sense of a change that is not immediately obvious.
Nothing went wrong, the business didn’t break and the decisions you made were reasonable. It is just you are now adjusting around those decisions.
This is what tends to happen:
What is important to remember is this.
The decisions weren’t wrong. The problem was in the moment you made the decisions felt clearer than it really was.
If your best month can feel like everything is aligned, why doesn’t it hold and continue? What is it about that moment that makes it feel more certain than it actually is?
