Thirty minutes, one screen share, twelve months of your own numbers. You leave knowing the three places your cash is actually going and which one to fix first. No slides, no proposal, no follow-up sequence.
We take on four new clients a quarter. Most of the businesses in these calls do not need us afterwards, and we say so on the call rather than in a polite email a week later.
Cash reviews run for owner-managed businesses in
In four years of these calls, the cash was hiding in one of these six about nine times out of ten. The italic line under each is what the owner said before we looked.
Your customers pay in 60 days and your suppliers want 14. That gap is a loan you are giving out, and it is usually the single biggest number in the review.
"Everyone in our industry pays late, there's nothing to do about it."Twelve months of purchase data against twelve months of sales, line by line. There is almost always a shelf of money that has not sold since last winter.
"It'll sell eventually, we just have to be patient."Revenue by line is easy; margin by line after delivery, returns and the hours it eats is not. One line in three carries a negative contribution once you count properly.
"That one's our flagship, we'd never drop it."Twelve months of bank feed, sorted by recurrence. The record so far is $41,000 a year across tools, storage and two insurance policies covering the same van.
"We cleaned all that up two years ago."We price the hours you personally spend on things a $30 hire could do. It is not a motivational point; it goes in the model as a real cost with a real payback period.
"It's faster if I just do it myself."A profitable year with no reserve is the most common reason a healthy business runs out of cash in month eleven. We show the month it happens on your own numbers.
"We'll deal with that when the bill arrives."The call is a working session, not a discovery call. Nobody asks about your five-year vision.
Not the business — one specific month where the money got tight. That single month tells us more than a company overview ever does, and it puts us straight into your actual numbers.
Bank feed, aged receivables, and a profit and loss for twelve months. Nothing is prepared in advance and nothing is presented at you — you watch the sorting happen and you can stop us at any line.
Named, quantified per month, and ranked. For most businesses the top item is worth more than the other two together, which is what makes the ranking useful rather than a to-do list.
Two actions you can take on your own, described concretely enough to start on Monday. If a third action genuinely needs outside help, we say what that would cost — once — and the call ends.
A one-page written summary of the three leaks arrives by email the next morning. It is yours whether or not you ever speak to us again.
All three gave permission for the figures to be published. Two of them never became clients.
A print shop invoicing on delivery instead of on collection, with 40% up front on jobs over $2,000. The change was one sentence in their terms and took an afternoon.
Print and signage · 11 staff · did not become a clientStock ordering moved from quarterly to monthly for the fastest 30 lines and stopped entirely for 14 lines that had not sold in a year. Storage cost fell as a side effect.
Homeware wholesale · 24 staff · client since 2026Their best-selling product was losing $6 a unit after delivery and returns. It took the owner four months to accept the number, then two weeks to stop selling it.
Furniture · 6 staff · did not become a client
Fourteen years as a financial controller across manufacturing, wholesale and two hospitality groups, then six years doing this. She is not a salesperson and there is no junior who "qualifies" you first — the person on the call is the person who would do the work.
The six-slot weekly limit exists because these calls are unbillable and she does them personally. It is also why the calendar is usually a week or two out; booking early is genuinely the difference.
Free consultations are usually a pitch with a friendly name. This one ends in advice you can act on alone — but we do want some of these calls to turn into work, so the pricing is printed here rather than saved for a proposal.
The full thirty minutes, the three ranked leaks with numbers attached, the two actions you can take without us, and the written summary the next morning. No account is created, no card is taken, and you are not added to a mailing list.
Around seven in ten of these calls end there, and that is the expected outcome rather than a failure.
These numbers are said once on the call if you ask, and never twice. No retainer runs longer than twelve months without stopping to ask whether it is still earning its fee.
"I expected a polite half hour and a proposal. I got a number I did not want to see, ranked above two things I had been worrying about instead. We fixed the top one ourselves in a fortnight."
"Rosalind told me on the call that I did not need a consultant, I needed to invoice on time. It was not what I wanted to hear and it was the most useful thirty minutes of that year."
"We became clients after the review, but what sold me was that the price came up once, plainly, and then she went back to the numbers. Nobody chased me afterwards. I chased them."
Three exports from your accounting software: twelve months of profit and loss, the current aged receivables list, and the bank transactions for the same period. The confirmation email names the exact menu item in the five most common packages. If you cannot get them, come anyway and we do the first ten minutes by hand.
A mutual NDA is signed before you send anything, and nothing is required before the call — you can share your screen instead of sending files. Anything sent is deleted within thirty days unless you become a client, and we will never use your figures as an example, even anonymously, without written permission.
Only if you ask what working together costs, and then once. There is no follow-up sequence: you get the written summary the next morning and then nothing unless you write back. If you would rather we never contact you again, say so on the call and that is the end of it.
Below roughly $150,000 a year the answer is usually pricing and invoicing discipline rather than anything structural, and thirty minutes is enough to say which. Businesses that small almost never become clients, and the call is still worth running — that is why the slot limit is per week and not per lead.
Please invite them. Half of the actions from these calls are things your existing accountant can do, and it goes faster when they hear the reasoning rather than a summary of it. We do not replace accountants and we do not comment on their work.
Tell us any time before the slot and it goes to someone on the waiting list. There is no penalty and you can rebook — but two no-shows without a message and we stop offering the slot, because the six a week are genuinely limited.
Fill this in and two time options come back within one working hour, with a mutual NDA and the short list of files to bring.