You're Making More Money and Sleeping Less
"Payroll is killing me."
A business owner said that to me this week. Second year in business. She'd just finished telling me revenue doubled — crossed the $1M goal in the second year, schedule booked into November.
Both of those are true at the same time. That's the part nobody warns you about.
Growth bills you before it pays you.
You put a second crew on before the work that pays for them lands. You front $40K in material so the job can start Monday. You cover Friday payroll for work that gets paid on the 15th of next month, because that's when the GC cuts checks and nothing you say moves that date.
The money is real. It's just not there yet.
That gap has a name. It's called working capital, and it's the most common reason a profitable business runs out of cash.
Doubling didn't break anything. It moved the clock.
Year one, money came in and went out in the same month. Short jobs, one crew, one cycle. You could hold the whole thing in your head between the truck and the kitchen table.
Double it and the timing splits apart. Expenses slide to the front of the job — deposit, material, the two-week equipment rental, payroll starting the day the crew shows up. Revenue slides to the back — retainage held, a punch list nobody's scheduled, an invoice sitting in somebody's approval queue since the 3rd.
The distance between those two ends got longer. You're the one standing in it, covering the middle out of your own account.
You're not bad with money. You're funding your own growth.
You've been carrying this like a character flaw. Like a more organized version of you would have it handled by now. So you run the math at 4pm, get a number you can live with, then run it again at 2am because you don't trust the first one. No filing system closes a 45-day gap. Being awake for it doesn't either.
Three numbers that end the 2am math.
You already have all three. They come off reports you're sitting on right now — the payroll register, the bank statement, the AR aging. Nobody has ever put them side by side for you.
Your loaded payroll number. The whole amount that has to clear on Friday — wages, employer taxes, workers comp, whatever you match. Most owners can quote the wage number cold and have never once added the rest. The real number is usually 25 to 30 percent higher than the one in their head.
Your cash cushion, measured in pay cycles. One cycle is a coin flip. Two lets you breathe. Three means you can turn down the job that pays in 90 days without doing the math on what happens if you do.
Your collection gap. The days between sending the invoice and the money landing in your account. If that number is 45 and payroll runs every 14, you're three cycles deep on your customers' work before their check ever clears. You're financing their business for free, and they'd never do it for you.
A plan is just knowing three weeks early.
A cash flow plan tells you what's coming in, what's going out, and where the thin weeks land — before they land. Panic is finding out Thursday at 4pm. Same information, three weeks earlier, while you can still do something with it.
There's a date sitting in front of you right now: September 15. The next federal estimate. Peak-season money is moving through your account this month and some of it already belongs to that payment. A plan is what keeps you from spending it twice.
This is the Hustle Stage
The revenue is real, the crew is real, and the system you built for year one isn’t built for a million dollar company. It was never asked to see around a 45-day corner.
Here's what staying there costs. Without the timing, every call gets made from fear. You take the job that pays in 90 because saying no feels like a risk you can't measure. You skip the second truck you actually need. You pull from the tax money and promise yourself you'll put it back before September. With the timing, you choose. Same business, same jobs on the table, completely different Thursday.
You'll make payroll this Friday. You'll probably make it every Friday this year. The only thing in question is whether you find out Thursday at 4pm or three weeks ahead of it.
I wrote the cash flow work into the book. From Hustle to Architect walks you through those three numbers directly — which reports to pull, how to build the picture, and how to read what it's telling you. Get the book, build the plan, and stop finding out on Thursday.
Read the full From Hustle to Architect framework: simplybalancedaccountants.com/stage-guide
Leslea Burnett-Little, EA, is the founder of Simply Balanced Accountants. She works exclusively with women who own and operate contractor businesses in Michigan — helping them get clear on their numbers, keep more of what they earn, and build a business that works for their family.
