You don’t fix cash flow by working on cash flow.
Robert asked. The Collective Brain answered.
Last Friday’s essay, The Boat or the Crew, landed three “bolt” stories from my businesses. The cash flow one was the bolt that hit hardest. The deepest reaction came from Robert Neyens, a B2B sales expert I have worked with and who knows the territory cold.
He left a comment that ended with a question I want to spend the next thousand words on:
“I have had multiple times where we ran record months, inventory was down, and I am pretty sure cash was stretched thin, but nobody ever told me about it. I assume you share sensitive information like cash flow in general terms? How can each A-team player adapt to a potential cash-flow situation? Do you turn away potential business because you know stock won’t last? How do you slow down sales from wanting to sell everything?”
Four questions in one paragraph. Each one is sharper than most quarterly board prep I have sat through.
The honest answer is that in most companies Robert’s experience is the default. Sales is the tip of the spear, and the last people in the building to know what cash flow actually is. That isn’t malice. That’s structure. You can’t fix it by sharing more reports. You fix it by changing the structure that makes the question invisible in the first place.
Here’s how we run it in our businesses today.
Start with the Collective Brain.
Wednesday’s post named this, and several of you wrote in. The Collective Brain isn’t a metaphor. It’s a daily mechanism. Everyone has access to the numbers, the knowledge, and the strategy. Everyone is asked for input on what they see. The brain stays fed because the brain stays asked.
The proof you have actually built one is that a junior in fulfillment will spot a cash-flow risk before a VP, because the junior has access, context, and dignity. If your junior can’t, you don’t have a Collective Brain. You have a dashboard.
Question 1: how do you share sensitive cash-flow information?
Three things.
→ Everyone has access to the business dashboard. Always. Not gated. Not “ask your manager.” The files live where every employee can open them.
→ Monthly walk-through plus Q&A. Across departments: engineering, sales, accounting, fulfillment. The goal is to connect the business to the numbers first, then dive into what the numbers might say versus what reality actually says.
→ Frame every number against what’s happening. A cash-flow dip in one month? Could be product mix: a large low-margin order, a misdirected sales push. Could be discounting. Could be an accounting anomaly. Could be cyclical. Could be a correction from a previous month that was exceptionally high. Always look at things and periods as connected. We do not live in a vacuum. Nor in a still picture.
The data is nonsensical without framing. Andy Grove wrote that a manager should do two things: motivation and training. Sharing the dashboard without training to read it is neither.
Question 2: how can each A-team player adapt to a cash-flow situation?
This is the question most companies refuse to answer, because the honest answer requires admitting that almost every role affects cash flow. Here are the obvious levers:
→ Sales. Payment terms. Down-payments on built-to-order. Adjusted terms by deal size and customer profile. Discount discipline. The sales role isn’t just to close, it’s to structure business deals and partnerships in a way that’s good for cash.
→ Purchasing. Supplier payment terms (longer is better, within trust limits). Right products on stock. An order that ships in 24 hours becomes cash 30 days faster than an order that ships in three weeks.
→ Fulfillment / shipping. Same-day shipping. Every order that leaves today can be invoiced today.
→ Finance / admin. Every day you invoice sooner is a day less in receivables. Sounds trivial. It isn’t. A two-day improvement in invoicing speed across a year is real money.
→ Marketing. Campaign timing. Promote what has stock, margin, and shipping speed, not what’s old or what someone wants to clear.
→ Customer service. Faster issue resolution reduces credit notes and returns. Better customer satisfaction means faster renewals, and renewals are cash flow with no cost of acquisition.
→ Engineering / product. Design for cost. Reduce custom work where it can be standardized. Standardization keeps stock predictable and invoicing fast.
→ Operations. Inventory turnover. Less WIP. Faster cash conversion cycle.
Every single one of these levers belongs to a person, not a department. Once each person sees their lever, the whole business starts breathing differently.
Question 3: do you turn away business because stock won’t last?
The traditional answer in most companies is: no, never turn business away. And then they over-promise and miss delivery and burn the customer.
Our answer: you almost never turn business away. But you almost never over-promise either.
The sales team is the tip of the spear. They need to know exactly what is in stock and exactly when it can be delivered if it isn’t. Promises kept reinforce future business. Over-promised, under-delivered orders are the opposite of cash flow: they are returns, credits, and churn.
The thing that makes this possible isn’t a sales script. It’s the Collective Brain. The sales person on the phone needs to know what the warehouse looks like in real time AND what’s in the supply pipeline AND what the customer’s actual deadline is. If those three pieces of information live in three different heads, sales over-promises by default.
Question 4: how do you “slow down” sales from wanting to sell everything?
The most overlooked answer in business, and the simplest: change the reward structure.
Reward structure determines behavior more reliably than coaching, more reliably than training, more reliably than reorganization. If your salespeople are rewarded on volume, they will sell everything. If they are rewarded on margin, they will sell margin. If they are rewarded on customer lifetime value, they will sell to fit.
Don’t ask sales to slow down. Restructure the comp plan so the right pace IS the most rewarded pace. It will take a quarter or two to land. It will land more powerfully than anything else you do.
The second lever: marketing. Pull the customers toward the offers that are good for the business. Push them via reward structure on the inside; pull them via positioning on the outside. The push-pull is what makes the system self-organizing.
The bigger point under all four answers is the same.
You don’t fix cash flow by working on cash flow. You fix the structure that creates the cash flow.
Collective Brain. Dashboard transparency. Role-specific awareness. Reward structures pointing in the right direction. None of these is the work of a CFO. All of them are the work of the operator who decides the business will be one where the answer to “how is cash flow this month?” can be given by anyone in the building.
I made a video on this during Covid for small business operators trying to survive. The whole project here, the newsletter, the eventual book, the OSBB philosophy, is built on the same belief: the knowledge of how to build and run a business sustainably should be openly available, like reading or swimming.
If you want to go deeper on the cash flow piece, watch it here:
Thanks to Robert Neyens, MBA for the question that became this issue. The book is being written in public partly so readers can co-create the chapters they want to see. He just did.
Be water, my friend. 🌊
Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. This issue first appeared on LinkedIn. Every issue lives here.