Roake & Cook Limited

16/10/2026

Revenue: £1.4m. Growing 38% year on year.

On paper, the best year they'd ever had.

The reality? £14,000 in the bank on the 28th. Payroll due Friday. VAT bill the following Tuesday.

Here's what was happening underneath:

→ Debtor days had crept from 42 to 68. Two retail accounts were paying on 60 day terms.

→ Stock had ballooned. New packaging minimum order quantities and a new SKU had added £92k of inventory sat in the warehouse.

→ Supplier terms were 30 days.

Every new wholesale order made the cash problem worse, not better.

The fix wasn't a bigger overdraft. It was four levers, pulled at once:

Debtor days down to 45. Deposits on new accounts, weekly statements, two slow-payers dropped.

Stock down by £38k. Slow lines paused, MOQs renegotiated on two key lines.

Supplier terms extended to 45 with the two biggest suppliers. Asked, got it, took 20 minutes.

Price up 5% across the trade list. Lost zero accounts.

Cash position three months later: £148,000.

Same revenue. Same margin. Different business.

If growth feels like it's chewing through your bank balance, you're not failing. You're running out of working capital. That's a fixable problem.

14/10/2026

Real feedback from clients we work with every day.

Simple numbers. Better decisions. Stronger businesses.

12/10/2026

02/10/2026

Many business owners fail to track where their customers come from.

Without this, they have very little idea where marketing efforts are working well, and where they need some work.

This leads to:

❌ Activity without clarity

Lots of posting. Lots of effort.
Very little data showing what actually converts into paying clients.

❌ Spend without strategy

Ad budgets drip out across multiple platforms - none of them big enough to generate meaningful results or learnings.

❌ No visibility on true ROI

Leads come in…but no one tracks which channel produced profitable customers versus time-wasters.

❌ Decisions based on noise, not numbers

Trends, competitors and agencies drive choices - not your financial data.

Marketing shouldn’t feel like gambling.

Instead:

✅ Track every lead source inside your systems
✅ Measure cost per lead and cost per client
✅ Link marketing spend to actual profit - not vanity metrics
✅ Double down only on what delivers returns
✅ Stop funding channels that don’t pay you back

If you don’t know which channels are making you money (and which are quietly draining it), your accounts should be telling you.

Structure your numbers to give you that information and track it on a weekly basis.

Use it to focus efforts and see your business grow.

30/09/2026

3 Reasons your pricing is quietly killing your margins.

- You priced to beat competitors, not to reflect your value
- Your price hasn't moved since you launched
- You're discounting to drive volume, but destroying margin in the process

28/09/2026

Every sale — wholesale, DTC, farm shop, market stall — goes to one sales code. One line. One lump sum.

The P&L says you made £240,000 last year. But it can't tell you which products earned that money and which ones quietly ate it.

A producer came to us with 'healthy margins'.

Revenue growing. Felt good.

We split their sales into five codes.

Within a week, the picture changed completely. Gift sets — their 'best seller' at Christmas — were running at a 6% margin after packaging and fulfilment.

Online bundles were the real engine at 52%.

They'd been pouring marketing spend into the wrong product for two years.

Setting up proper sales codes takes an afternoon. Not a week. Not a consultancy project. An afternoon in Xero.

One afternoon that lets you see margin by product, by channel, by season.

Every month. Automatically.

You can't improve what you can't measure. And you can't measure what you've buried in a single line.

25/09/2026

Real feedback from clients we work with every day.

Simple numbers. Better decisions. Stronger businesses.

23/09/2026

Most business owners look at their bank balance and call it cash flow management.

It isn't.

A 13-week cash forecast is one of the most useful tools you'll ever build.

Here's why.

Thirteen weeks is a quarter. Far enough out to spot trouble before it arrives. Close enough to actually be accurate.

It shows you the week your VAT bill lands at the same time as payroll. It shows you the gap in March when one big customer always pays late. It shows you whether you can afford that new hire - not in theory, but on a specific Tuesday.

How to build one:

Open a spreadsheet. 13 columns, one per week.

Row 1: opening bank balance. Then list every receipt you expect - by customer, by week.

Then every payment - payroll, rent, suppliers, VAT, PAYE, loan repayments, your own drawings.

Closing balance becomes next week's opening balance.

Update it every Friday. Takes 20 minutes once it's set up.

Best practice is to use a cash flow report from your bookkeeping software and keep the same format, which will allow easier 'actuals vs forecast' and a consistent structure.

Be realistic. The 'just add 3%' doesn't provide any benefit.

What you'll see in week one will surprise you. The expensive month isn't where you thought. The squeeze is three weeks closer than you assumed. The "good" customer pays slower than the "difficult" one.

You can't fix what you can't see. And you can't see cash flow on a bank balance.

Build the forecast. Update it weekly. Sleep better.

21/09/2026

The most dangerous sentence in small business finance:

“We'll catch up when sales improve.”

Variations include:
“Once we land the [big customer], everything will be fine.”
“Cash flow will sort itself once the busy season hits.”
“We just need a couple more good months.”

Here is the uncomfortable truth.

If your cash conversion cycle is broken, more sales make the problem worse, not better.

Every additional £50,000 of revenue triggers another round of stock-buying, another wave of unpaid invoices, another VAT liability.

And the bigger the sales, the bigger the cash hole.

This is how profitable businesses end up in administration. Not from lack of demand. From success that the cash flow could not absorb.

18/09/2026

Rising costs. Tighter margins. Customers who are more careful about where they spend. A tax bill that seems to land at the worst possible time.

The instinct is to work harder. Longer hours. More hustle. Push through.

But working harder inside a broken system just burns you out faster.

Three things that can help:

𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲. Stop doing manually what software can do automatically. Get hours back every week. Spend them on the stuff that actually moves the needle.

𝗘𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆. Look hard at where money is leaking — wastage, supplier terms, unused subscriptions, products that are busy but not profitable. Plug the gaps quietly and quickly.

𝗖𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆. Stop guessing and start making decisions based on actual numbers. Know your margins. Watch your cash flow. Set a small number of focused goals and ignore everything else.

None of this requires a big budget.

It requires slowing down for one afternoon, looking your business honestly in the eye, and asking: where is the waste, and what can I stop doing?

The pinch is real. But it's also a forcing function — it pushes the best businesses to get leaner, sharper and better run than they've ever been.

The question isn't whether things are hard right now.

The question is: what are you doing about it?