The fourth cause of poor cashflow - Your debt or capital structure

Anna Stubbs • April 19, 2024

Often a reduction in interest charges as well as significant cashflow improvements can be achieved with a regular review of existing debt.

A good place to start is to list all bank loans, mortgages, finance company loans, hire purchases, credit card debts, and any other debts (don’t include amounts owed to suppliers in this list). Add columns to cover:

  • The amount of the debt owed
  • The interest rate being charged
  • Whether the interest is charged on a fixed or floating rate basis
  • Repayment terms (the number of years the debt is to be repaid over)


Perhaps your debt can be consolidated, financed by one lender and paid off over a longer term. This will help you retain more cash in the business which is vital for growth (or even just to cover expenses and your drawings).

Are the drawings you take from the business for personal expenses placing pressure on cashflow? If so, that might mean that we need to look at strategies to lift the profitability of the business. It might mean that your drawings are just too high for the business to support right now. The business may need an injection of capital to fund its growth.

Here’s an interesting exercise for you to do. List out your annual personal expenditure in detailed categories; everything from rent, childcare, groceries and eating out. You may need to prepare yourself for a shock. If you’re serious about this, we have a Personal Budget Template that you can use to make life easier.

Getting your debt and capital structure right makes a big difference to the cashflow in your business. This is a subject that we have a lot of experience in. The first step is to prepare an updated personal budget and a Cashflow Forecast, then measure the extra cash the business will have as a result of making some simple changes. We can help you calculate this extra cash at our Cashflow & Profit Improvement Meeting.

Doing a forecast for the first time seems scary, but once you’ve done it, you’ll realise that it’s one of the most essential business tools you’ll ever put in place. We can do the forecast with you. You’ll sleep better for it!

The importance of having a business coach

By Anna Stubbs • October 6, 2025
It can be lonely at the top when you're running your own business. As the owner manager, the buck stops with you and that can result in all the pressures of financial management, people management, strategy and business performance ending on your shoulders.  To ease this pressure, it's helpful to have a business coach. A coach can look at your business objectively as an outsider, will act as a professional shoulder to lean on, and can help you to focus on and enhance your business ideas, strategy and longer-term tactics as an owner.

Do you need to improve the cash flow position for your business?

By Anna Stubbs • October 6, 2025
Keeping on top of the financial management of your business can be hard work. It's possible to have a profitable business that is struggling to find the cash flow to pay expenses and fund growth. Likewise, you could have positive cash flow but are not turning a profit, particularly if you are scaling. Turning a profit is at the heart of running any successful company But without an even and predictable flow of cash into the company, you can't cover your overheads, you can't pay your employees and you can't run your day-to-day operations – let alone think about expanding and growing the business. In the end, you need both. But if you’re going to be in control of your financial destiny, it’s important to get your head around the important process of cash flow management.

Can you build a viable one-person business?

By Anna Stubbs • October 6, 2025
A solopreneur running a complete and viable one-person business is no longer a pipedream. Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open AI, was recently quoted as saying that a one-person, billion-dollar business could be possible by 2026-2028, using tools like GPT-5 and the other generative AI tools that allow individuals to create and manage AI agents. The idea that one person, a solo CEO and entrepreneur, could generate that kind of capital on their own, would have seemed crazy less than a decade ago. But with the power of AI and the accessibility of flexible coding tools and AI agents, it’s actually a real possibility. Let’s look at how a one-person business could work, and how the basic business model differs from the traditional tech start-up model that we’ve known for so many decades.