Short essays on finance, capacity, and what AI actually changes for an SME. Two tracks — Finance, and AI & Capacity — the two halves of one flywheel: the numbers you can trust, then the reach you can't hire. Written for founders, finance directors, and the few investors we admire.
Six months of experiments. Real enthusiasm. Zero movement in the numbers. The problem isn’t the tools — it’s that nobody gave AI a baseline, a target, or an owner. The CFO fix is simpler than the hype suggests.
Take your fully-loaded cost per head. Unlock 15–20% of capacity across the team. For a 50-person firm, that’s the math of seven to ten hires you never make.
The EDG can co-fund up to half of a properly scoped transformation. Most owners don’t apply — and the ones who do usually trip the same wire: starting work before approval.
I’ve seen profitable businesses nearly go under — not because they were losing money, but because they ran out of cash at exactly the wrong moment. Why profit and cash drift apart, how far apart they can get, and the disciplines that keep the queen in charge.
A polite disagreement with the advice most founders hear. The difference between keeping books and steering a business — and why conflating them is the single most expensive mistake in early scaling.
A scene that plays out in SME boardrooms every week. The founder asks one question. The accountant gives a technically correct reply. And neither of them realises they were talking about different things.
Last year's numbers, plus 5%, divided by twelve. It looks like planning. It isn't. A short argument for rebuilding the budget as a conversation, not a calculation.
Healthy margins, by sector, for local operators. Not pulled from a global consultancy PDF — pulled from the engagements we've actually run. Plus a short guide to what context the numbers don't tell you.
I spent a decade inside billion-dollar forecasting cycles. Most of the machinery is overkill. But two or three habits matter enormously — and cost almost nothing to adopt.
Every expense claim, every payment run, every vendor invoice — one co-founder was approving them all. Here's the three-page document that ended that, and the logic behind each threshold.
Finance transformation sounds like a project only MNCs can afford. It isn't. This is the map we use with every SME client — the four layers, what changes inside each, and why most firms start at the wrong layer.
A gym. Quiet, steady churn. The marketing team found out when members had already been gone for weeks. What the data had been saying all along — and the weekly ritual that made it audible.
Pricing is the single highest-stakes decision a new business makes. Get it wrong and no amount of hustle will save you. Six mistakes I see every quarter, and what to do about each one before launch.
Founders can always tell you revenue. Few can tell you the one metric that actually predicts whether the business is getting healthier or sicker. This is that number — and why it's hidden in plain sight.
The monthly ritual where everyone agrees the variances are explainable and nothing changes. A short argument for why the report itself is the problem — and what to replace it with.
A creative agency, relentless pitching, optimistic founders. And no shared answer to the simplest possible question: what's actually going to close this quarter. What we did about it.
Every founder wears it for a while. Most wear it far too long. A careful accounting of what it actually costs — not in hours, but in decisions never made and opportunities never seen.
"How many people should I hire?" is the wrong question. The right one is about composition. A framework for thinking about who, not how many — and the ratio that keeps emerging across engagements.
A founder showed me a global industry report saying his margins should be 25–30%. In Singapore, for his sector, they shouldn't. Why the benchmarks mislead, and how to build your own that don't.
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The operating manual we give clients.
Request by email PDF · 02How permanent capabilities get built.
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