Nadia Codreanu

You’ve made sure enough money came in this month. Maybe even a little more than expected. Then a tax bill arrives, or a client who always paid on time suddenly doesn’t. The money still has to come from somewhere. You take out credit, delay something else or, as I’ve done before, reach into your own savings to cover the gap. The bigger the business, the more money you have to find. Getting caught once is painful. When it happens again, you can end up frighteningly close to the edge.

When cash flow tightens and the revenue forecast dips, it feels reassuring to cut the thing that looks expensive on paper. Then a few months later, you realise it was doing more work than you thought. Pressure makes bad cuts feel rational, and a bad cut rarely looks bad at the time you make it. Nadia Codreanu, the CFO who writes The Profit Lens, has seen that pattern up close more than once.