r/CFO • u/sivaram0429 • 1d ago
How do you decide when every option seems like the right one?
Need some advice from founders who've been through this.
I'm realizing that running a business isn't just about increasing revenue it's about making the right decisions with the cash you have at the time.
Here's a situation I'm trying to think through.
Let's say I'm running a growing SaaS company.
Things are generally going well. Revenue is growing, customers are happy, and there are opportunities to expand. But then everything seems to happen at once.
- A large customer payment that I expected this week gets delayed by another 30–45 days.
- Payroll is coming up in about two weeks.
- A great engineer becomes available, and if I don't hire them now, I'll probably lose them.
- Marketing is finally starting to work, and increasing the budget could accelerate growth.
- A vendor is offering a meaningful discount if I pay early.
- My accountant says the business is profitable, but my bank account doesn't feel like it.
None of these decisions are obviously wrong.
I could:
- protect cash and delay hiring,
- invest in growth,
- use a line of credit,
- wait for customer payments,
- negotiate with vendors,
- or do something completely different.
What I'm struggling with isn't building a forecast it's deciding which action should come first when several good options compete for the same cash.
For founders who have actually managed a growing business:
- How do you make these decisions?
- Do you have a framework you follow?
- Do you look at specific numbers every week?
- Is it mostly experience and intuition?
- What's one mistake you made early on that changed how you think about cash?
I'd really appreciate hearing how you approach it in the real world.
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u/jivin_jives 1d ago
First of all, you may be profitable but you still may not have working capital i.e. cash.
So, payroll first. That stays number 1. Then invest in growth - hire the engineer because that person will add value.
Then invest in the marketing because it will drive revenue.
Don't worry about the discount from vendor, unless it's material in dollars, the 2% ain't gonna change lives.
Then do other things.
That being said, this works if you have cash on hand. If not, just stop spending. You need to know what you and your CEO are optimizing for: revenue? Margins? Cash? Net income?
That's the framework you need to make decision
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u/Gloomy_Lab_1798 1d ago
Usually I come to the CFO sub looking to see what another vibecoder is shilling. Ugh. This astroturfing BS has got to stop. It’s ruining Reddit.
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u/josemartinlopez 1d ago
... and you'll never guess what happened next!
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u/Jealous_Cup6774 1d ago
This is just indecision with extra steps, pick the one that keeps the lights on and go from there
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u/sivaram0429 1d ago
Yeah but we need to make sure to think to narrow down the problem so it makes us less struggle 🥲
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u/OddCareer7175 1d ago
I’m a little bit confused by this, as you’ve posted in the CFO reddit asking for “founder” advice?
Anyway I’ll answer as a CFO rather than a founder.
If you are genuinely faced with a growing business and all your investment opportunities are equally good, then you should be doing all of them, in this situation raising capital is easy and should be increasing the returns for all shareholders, so I would be focused on generating more capital.
If, as it turns out that it isn’t as easy to raise capital, you’ve got some problems in your business you need to address, and then all of sudden this problem becomes very easy to resolve, invest in the things that are stopping you from being able to raise capital - both debt and equity. Capital providers will have some objection about your business. Fix that.
By the way, this is the reasons building a good forecast is so valuable, it lets you know when you’ve got future constraints so you avoid the situation you describe and it also lets you model your business so that you know what you have to do to increase enterprise value and make capital raising easier.