8:47am. Monday. The controller walks into the CEO's office and closes the door.
"We have eight days of cash."
Not eight weeks. Eight days.
The CEO had approved three new hires on Friday. Signed a lease expansion on Thursday. Told the board last month that runway was "comfortable through Q2."
None of that was a lie when he said it. The numbers just moved while nobody was watching.
I've watched this scene play out maybe thirty times. Different companies, different industries, same pattern.
The cash crisis that "came out of nowhere" was visible six weeks ago—if anyone had been looking. The collection that slipped to 90 days overdue started slipping at 45. The project that blew budget by $200K was off-track at $40K, but the report that would have shown it doesn't get run until month-end.
The ambush isn't the problem. The ambush is the symptom.
The problem is the gap between when something happens and when someone who can do something about it finds out.
Here's how it works at most companies:
Week 1-2: Something goes wrong. A payment doesn't arrive. An expense hits that wasn't planned. A project burns faster than estimated.
Week 3-4: The data exists somewhere. It's in the bank feed, the AP system, the project tracker. But nobody's looking at that system this week. Or the person who would notice is on vacation. Or the report that would surface it doesn't run until the 15th.
Week 5-6: The monthly close happens. Someone reconciles something. The number shows up in a report that reaches someone who can act on it.
Week 6+: Fire drill.
Six weeks. That's the typical lag between reality changing and leadership knowing about it. In six weeks, a manageable problem becomes a crisis. A fixable issue becomes an ambush.
The $200K project overrun I mentioned? That company had to lay off four people to cover it. Those four people didn't cause the overrun. They just happened to be the available budget once the damage was done.
The eight-days-of-cash CEO? He made the new hires anyway—couldn't back out of the offers without destroying the company's reputation. Funded it with a bridge loan at 18% interest. Spent the next year digging out.
Ambushes aren't just stressful. They're expensive. And the expense isn't just the problem itself. It's the bad decisions you make when you're reacting instead of managing.
When you find out about a cash gap on Monday morning, your options are: panic, beg, or bleed. When you find out six weeks earlier, your options are: collect faster, spend slower, or adjust the plan. Same problem. Completely different set of solutions.
Most CEOs I work with know they're flying partially blind. They feel it. The hesitation before answering a board question. The anxiety on Sunday night about what Monday might reveal. The vague sense that the numbers they're seeing are already old.
But here's what they don't usually calculate: the cost of that blindness compounds.
Every ambush erodes board confidence. Every "we didn't see that coming" makes the next fundraise harder, the next strategic bet less likely to get approved, the next crisis more destabilizing.
I watched a company lose a term sheet—not because of the ambush itself, but because during diligence the investor asked how the ambush happened and didn't like the answer. "We found out during our monthly close" is not the answer investors want to hear.
Foundation Rhythm—the first rhythm in the Financial Rhythm System—exists to close the gap.
Daily cash visibility. Not a dashboard that exists. A process that happens. Every morning, before the first meeting, someone knows exactly where cash stands, what's coming in, what's going out.
A close calendar that compresses the blindspot. Ten days, not twenty-five. The faster you close, the faster you know, the faster you can act.
Weekly margin tracking that catches drift before it becomes damage. Not waiting for month-end to find out that project is bleeding. Knowing at week two, when you can still do something about it.
The specifics vary by business. The principle doesn't: shorten the gap between reality and awareness until ambushes become impossible.
Some CEOs hear this and nod. Then don't do anything.
Not because they don't believe it. Because building visibility infrastructure feels less urgent than the crisis in front of them. Because investing in prevention doesn't feel as heroic as surviving the fire.
I don't have a great answer for that. Some companies have to get ambushed enough times before they invest in not getting ambushed. The smart ones learn from other people's Monday mornings.
You've probably already had your version of the 8:47am conversation. Maybe not eight days of cash. But something. A surprise that shouldn't have been a surprise.
The question is whether it was the last one.