Last week, I got a call from one of the finance & accounting team members at a client. He had given me a heads up that he was having a meeting with the CEO so I knew it would be important. I stepped out of a meeting that I was attending to take the call. He explained an idea that was going to consume significant cash. I asked whether he was able to put this into context of the 2026 cash flow? Given the short nature of his conversation with the CEO, I wasn’t surprised that the answer was “no”. We did some back of the envelope math and I said: “This has to push us toward a $10 million use of cash.” In Fortune 500 companies, that’s not a big deal. Frankly, when I was in corporate treasury at a $10 billion dollar company, I didn’t look at anything unless there was at least a $10 million impact. But as fractional CFO for smaller companies, this number is huge. We agreed to talk later.
That afternoon and into the next morning I spent about three and a half hours refining the 2026 cash flow forecast. Lots of moving pieces, variables and unknowns. A refined forecast resulted in $8 million before considering some bank financing which was already on the drawing board. Doing the math was easy part. Most of it was already completed in the 2026 budget spreadsheet and just needed some last-minute updates. The harder and more time-consuming part was refining the analysis and presentation. Sure, I could have printed a dozen pages with lots of numbers and font too small to read and tried to walk the CEO through cash flow timing, accruals, prepayments, income statement items, balance sheet items, non cash issues like depreciation and amortization, principal payments, and everything else that went into the analysis. But how would that have gone over? That would only serve to prove that I spent a lot of time with Excel.
Instead, we boiled it down to one page. Actually, less than that as the bottom half was blank. Only a dozen numbers. It took seconds for the CEO to understand the problem. We met with the CEO later for less than 10 minutes to discuss solutions which the accounting director and I already considered before the meeting. We left that short meeting with the action to come back with analysis of the final few options. We did quite a bit of work on considering the options but we boiled them down to a simple one-page document. I didn’t attend the follow up meeting. The accounting director now had it well-in-hand. Less than a week after the initial call, the issue is in the rear-view mirror (with some financing still to be finalized) and we’re discussing how we will address similar issues in 2027 and 2028.
There is an old saying, “Keep It Simple Stupid”. The value of time of the next level of management is extraordinary. The value of being able to get through an issue quickly is huge. A short elapsed time from issue identification to solution is of paramount importance.
Often it is neither easy nor simple. One of my goals is to make it appear so.
If your business could benefit from fractional CFO services, I would welcome the chance to speak with you. Please give me a call at (513) 225-8657 or send an email to [email protected]
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your cash is flowing. know where.®
Ken Homza
Copyright @ 2026 Kenneth M. Homza