The week it breaks

With thirteen weeks in front of you, ask the uncomfortable question: what would have to go wrong, and when would it hurt? Take your largest customer and pay them thirty days late. Take a quiet month and knock a quarter off the sales. Add an equipment failure. Each of these is an ordinary event, not a catastrophe, and the forecast will tell you the exact week the balance goes below zero.

That week is the most useful number in this course, because it converts a vague anxiety into a date. And a date has options attached to it. Bring receipts forward — deposits, part-payment on delivery, a discount for early settlement that you have costed properly. Push outflows back — supplier terms agreed in advance rather than a payment missed. Reduce the outflow — defer a purchase, hold less stock. Or arrange facilities before you need them, which is the one that has to happen early because nobody arranges credit well in the week they run out.

Then rank the options against the business you actually have, not against a textbook. A shop with slow-moving stock and a patient supplier has a different first move from a services business with three large clients and no stock at all. The output is not a list of things one could do; it is the one thing this owner should do first, with the reason, and the arithmetic under it.