Across every market we operate in, leadership teams are being pushed harder than ever. Advertising costs are rising. Customer acquisition is getting tougher. Cash flow is more volatile. Even businesses that are growing on paper are struggling to translate that growth into actual money in the bank.
What makes this environment more challenging is that many teams are still working with siloed priorities and incomplete information. Strategy looks to the future, marketing looks to the week, finance looks to the past and operations is stuck juggling everything in between. That disconnect is quietly eroding profitability in more organisations than most leaders care to admit.
In this edition of the CTD Roundtable we addressed this head on. The real problem is not just rising costs or market uncertainty. It is a lack of alignment across leadership functions. Forecasting is the solution that brings everything together and turns a fragmented business into one united around the decisions that actually protect cash, margin and long-term performance.
Everything in this article is drawn directly from our discussion with Glenn, Marty and Kate and reflects what we are seeing inside dozens of mid-sized businesses across New Zealand and Australia today.
Glenn opens with the trend he’s seeing across the board: businesses chasing scale first and hoping profitability follows, rather than growing in a way that’s fiscally responsible from the start. The first approach can move faster, but it’s the classic grow broke scenario, & the risk profile is completely different.
Profitable scaling takes longer, but it’s the far more considered path, & it gives a business a much better chance of a genuinely positive outcome rather than a fast climb followed by a hard fall.
Forecasting is one of the biggest missed opportunities Glenn sees across small, medium, & even larger businesses. Most business owners run on gut feel, deciding on hiring, expansion, & investment through instinct & a bit of after-the-fact due diligence, rather than a disciplined, forward-looking process.
Good forecasting turns that ambiguity into certainty. When you have real visibility on what’s coming in & going out, you can act decisively, & know whether now is the right moment to commit or whether waiting avoids unnecessary risk.
Recruitment is one of the most expensive decisions a business makes, & Glenn points out that hiring too early can create a wage burden that drains cash before a new hire is contributing real returns, while hiring too late leaves growth opportunities sitting on the table. Rolling cash flow forecasting shows exactly what a business can absorb, & at what salary range.
The same logic applies to stock & capital expenditure. Tying up cash in stock at the wrong time, without visibility into your cash conversion cycle, can be just as damaging, particularly for any business trading in physical product.
One of the biggest cash flow killers Glenn calls out is timing: provisional tax, insurance premiums, lease renewals, & debt repayments all landing in the same month or quarter, & quietly destroying the cash available in the business.
With a clear forecast, that becomes a simple decision instead of a crisis, pushing provisional tax out by a month or two, because you already know the revenue is coming. Forecasting also flags when there’s a hole in forward-focused cash early enough to chase down debtors or push harder on collections before it becomes a real problem.
For banks & investors, disciplined forecasting demonstrates something historical performance alone can’t: control of the future. Being able to show forecast against actual, consistently, derisks the business & increases the chances of funding, & potentially the value of the business itself.
Glenn’s other point is more personal: forecasting reduces the emotional load of decision-making under pressure. When you’ve already planned for a tight patch, you’re at peace with it, rather than making reactive cuts or grabbing unprofitable sales just to feel like you’re doing something.
Glenn runs through practical tools for bridging cash flow gaps: invoice factoring, fee funding, tax pooling, & short-term working capital facilities like overdrafts, used strategically rather than as a constant crutch. Being in overdraft as your only strategy isn’t a strategy at all.
On the software side, tools like Xero can forecast revenue, expenses, & profitability directly, & a good accountant, Glenn namechecks Next Advisory, can help set up cash flow forecasting alongside fee funding & tax pooling options.
Forecasting isn’t a finance-only exercise, it’s about understanding the impact your decisions are making on cash in real time, rather than reading a report after the fact that tells you how the decision already played out.
When sales, operations, & finance all work off the same forward-looking numbers, accountability improves across the board. Sales sees targets linked to real capacity, operations sees workload aligned with revenue, & finance gets the early visibility it needs to actually steer the business, not just report on it.
Kate’s read on the market right now: businesses are chasing scale & ROAS targets on belief alone, that more spend will keep generating more return, without real visibility on cash flow or profitability underneath it. That works until it doesn’t, & then the knee-jerk reaction is to slash media budgets, which does just as much damage to long-term performance.
Her framing is simple: revenue is for show, profit is for dough, & cash flow is king. Getting the balance right between brand & performance spend isn’t a fixed formula, it comes down to testing what actually works for your business & your customer.
Marty describes the trap a lot of marketers fall into: trusting platform-level numbers at face value, spend X, get Y back, without accounting for the multiple touchpoints & untracked channels that actually contributed to a sale. Living by channel-level reporting decouples you from what the business is actually making.
The fix is connecting marketing decisions back to the real state of the business: what’s actually selling, what stock is at risk, & whether that top-performing product in your ads still has the stock to back it up. Understanding your own AOV, conversion rate, & on-site behaviour gives you far more control than obsessing over rising CPMs.
Glenn’s closing point is about visibility across departments: marketing, sales, & operations working in isolation, each patting themselves on the back, while missing the actual impact of their work on profitability, what’s left over at the end of the day.
Marty adds that this understanding is hard to build if you’ve never been exposed to it, & the businesses most at risk are the ones that have painted themselves into a single-channel corner, where switching off one platform means sales disappear overnight, because there was never any real connection built with the customer underneath it.
What now?
Cash flow forecasting isn’t a finance department checkbox, it’s the clearest tool a leadership team has for making confident decisions instead of reactive ones. Build it into how you hire, how you manage stock, how you plan for tax & lease obligations, & how marketing, sales, & operations talk to each other, & you’ll trade the stress of gut-feel decision-making for a business that can actually see what’s coming.
Glenn Marvin, Connect the Dots
Kate Kennedy & Marty Jenkins-Lyttle, Connect the Dots
6 minutes
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