What we cover
Running a business is four jobs stacked on top of each other, and most people get handed all four at once with no training in any of them. Here is how the channel works through them.
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Start it right
The first ninety days set things that are expensive and awkward to change later. This stage is about making those decisions on purpose instead of defaulting into them.
- Choosing an entity and what actually changes
- Licensing, registration and insurance
- Contracts, terms and scope
- How you get paid, and how fast
- Setting up books that hold up later
- Paying yourself without creating a mess
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Know your numbers
Not accounting theory. The specific figures that tell you whether the business is working, how often to look at them, and what they mean when they move.
- Reading a profit and loss statement
- Why cash and profit are different things
- The handful of measures worth tracking
- Job, project and product costing
- What to send your accountant and when
- Reading a quote or an invoice critically
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Stay alive
Most businesses that fail were not unprofitable. They ran out of money at the wrong moment. This stage is about seeing that coming.
- Forecasting cash a few weeks out
- Collections without wrecking relationships
- Payroll timing and the squeeze
- Seasonality and slow months
- Which warning signs are real
- What to do when it gets tight
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Grow without breaking it
Growth breaks businesses that were working fine smaller. This stage is about adding capacity without outrunning the systems holding things together.
- Pricing and raising prices
- When you can genuinely afford to hire
- Process and systems that survive you
- Delegating without losing control
- When borrowing makes sense
- Knowing which work to turn down
A recurring series: what went wrong
Alongside the four stages, the channel runs breakdowns of how real businesses failed, worked backwards from the numbers. Not to gawk at them, but because the pattern repeats and it is easier to recognise in somebody else's business before you have to recognise it in your own.
Every one of them looked fine from the outside, right up until it did not.
Something missing?
If there is a question you keep running into and cannot get a straight answer on, send it over. Topic requests from actual owners are better than anything I would come up with on my own.