Recently, I was reading a fable with my kids. It went something like this:
Some hungry dogs saw a group of hides at the bottom of a stream.
The hides were exactly what they wanted. The problem was the water. The hides sat below the surface, too deep for the dogs to reach.
So the dogs held a council. They decided the best plan was to drink the river dry.
They lapped and lapped until one dog after another became sick from the effort. The water level stayed where it was. The hides stayed out of reach.
The dogs were working hard. Their plan simply could not solve the problem.
As I read, I couldn’t help but think about the business parallels I’ve seen.
It usually starts with an owner who believes the answer is more revenue.
More sales. More customers. More growth.
Then the bank account gets tighter.
In one business, the owner had about $1 million sitting in accounts receivable. On paper, the business had done the work and earned the revenue. The owner could see the receivables, but treated them as a separate accounting problem.
The aging report told a more urgent story. A meaningful amount of the balance was more than 60 days old, with plenty sitting beyond 90 days. The issue was visible, but the first action plan was mostly to wait. The owner knew AR needed attention. He did not yet see it as the thing putting pressure on the whole business.
That distinction matters. Accounts receivable is not just a line on the Balance Sheet. It represents work your team has already completed, costs you have already paid, and cash your business still cannot use.
A slow receivable changes the rest of the business. It affects payroll timing, vendor payments, debt capacity, owner distributions, and the amount of risk you can absorb.
The water was already too deep. The business was still treating the water as background.
Then the owner bought a truck.
He bought the truck with cash because he saw cash in the account. He saw cash because they’d pulled on their line of credit. A line of credit is generally designed to help with short-term working capital… a truck is a long-term asset that should be matched with a more appropriate financing structure.
But available funds can start to feel like permission. The owner saw the cash, without thinking about the line, and used it.
That decision pulled the existing cash pressure into the open. Once the line was nearly maxed out, it could no longer provide much room for the timing gap between paying expenses and collecting receivables.
The truck exposed how much pressure the aging AR had already placed on the business.
This is one of the reasons capital decisions and cash flow decisions have to be connected. The question is never only, “Can I get the money?” The better question is, “What job is this money supposed to do, and can the business support that job?”
And growth just kept making the problem worse.
When the team looked at timing, the problem became clearer.
The business was growing, but the cash system was not keeping pace. Work was happening before customers paid. Payroll and operating costs left the bank account on schedule. Collections moved according to someone else’s schedule.
Every new sale created more work to deliver and another receivable to collect. If the business kept selling without improving collection, the owner would dig the hole faster while believing growth was the way out.
That also changes how you think about margins. A sale can look profitable on the Income Statement while failing to produce the cash needed to support the next job. If the customer pays late, pays short, or never pays, the reported margin was carrying more confidence than the business had earned.
Profit matters. Cash matters too. A business can show profit and still become structurally fragile when it cannot turn that profit into cash.
This is the finance version of the dogs drinking the river. The business keeps adding effort to the same approach. The water stays high.
THE WRONG CONSTRAINT
The dogs wanted the hides. They chose to reduce the water level.
That choice became the entire strategy. They never stopped to ask whether drinking the river could actually change the result.
Business owners do something similar when they see a cash problem and respond with more sales, more borrowing, or more spending. Those actions can be useful in the right situation. They can also put more weight on a system that already struggles to collect and convert revenue.
The real constraint in this business was the time between doing the work and receiving the cash. The owner was looking at AR as a list of overdue invoices. The business needed to treat it as an operating rhythm.
That means asking how long it takes to invoice after work is complete, how much is more than 60 days old, and which customers make up the overdue balance. It means modeling what happens if collections arrive two weeks late, which expenses leave before the related customer payment, and whether the financing in place was designed to fund the thing it is currently funding.
The cash conversion cycle is simply the time between spending money and collecting it. The shorter that cycle, the more room the business has to operate and grow.
WHAT TO DO WHEN CASH IS TRAPPED
Start with the existing business before adding more growth. Pull the AR aging and connect it to the cash forecast. Then make the pressure visible in a way the owner and leadership team can act on.
- Treat aging as an operating metric. Set clear thresholds for 30, 60, and 90 days. Give someone ownership of each meaningful balance and define the next action.
- Match financing to the job. Use working capital facilities for working capital. Match trucks, equipment, and other long-term assets with financing built for those assets.
- Forecast the timing. A 13-week cash flow forecast should show expected collections by week alongside payroll, debt payments, taxes, and planned purchases.
- Test the margin with cash. Review write-offs, short-pays, collection delays, and the cost of carrying unpaid work. A margin that never becomes cash deserves a closer look.
- Put a growth gate in place. Before taking on more work, estimate how much cash the additional delivery will require and when the related customer payments should arrive.
The goal is controlled growth that gives the business more room instead of consuming the room it already has.
THE QUESTION TO ASK BEFORE SELLING MORE
The dogs needed a different way to reach the hides. More drinking could never solve the problem.
The business needed a different way to think about AR. The overdue balance was connected to the bank line, the truck purchase, the timing of payroll, the credibility of the margin, and the next round of growth.
That is the part owners often miss. Cash flow problems rarely stay inside the line where they first appear.
Before asking how to sell more, look at the work you have already completed. Pull the aging report. Highlight everything over 60 and 90 days. Map those balances against the next 13 weeks of cash needs.
Then ask one simple question: Which dollars have we already earned but still cannot use?
That question will usually take you closer to the real constraint than another revenue goal will.
If you want help building that view, start with a cash flow diagnostic or learn more about working with Bison CFO. You can also read 5 Cash Flow Drivers for a broader look at where cash gets stuck.
