The CEO called me on a Tuesday. Couldn't figure out what was happening.
Revenue was up 40%. Team had doubled. Customers were happy. Every metric that gets celebrated at all-hands meetings looked great.
But the distributions kept shrinking. Then they stopped entirely. Then the line of credit started climbing.
"I don't understand," he said. "We're winning."
I asked him when he'd last looked at his 13-week cash forecast.
Silence.
"We don't have one of those," he said. "We have an annual budget."
The annual budget said they'd be profitable. The reality was they were three weeks from missing payroll. A $23M company, six years old, 85 employees—and he couldn't make Friday's deposit without Wednesday's collection landing first.
He wasn't failing. He was succeeding himself to death.
What Growing Broke Actually Looks Like
Here's the pattern. I've seen it maybe thirty times now.
You win a big deal. Celebration. But to close it, you extended payment terms to net-60. And you agreed to some customization that's not in the contract. And you hired two people to support it before the ink was dry.
So the revenue shows up in 60 days. The costs show up immediately. The cash gap widens with every "win."
Do that ten times and you have a growing company with a shrinking bank account. Do it fifty times and you have a crisis that looks like it came out of nowhere—but was actually built one deal at a time.
The CEO I mentioned? His average deal size had grown 35% in two years. His average collection time had grown 80%. His cost to deliver had grown 60%.
The deals looked bigger. The margins were actually smaller. But nobody tracked that, because revenue growth was the number on the wall.
That's what Planning Rhythm solves. Not the deals. The blindness about what the deals actually cost.
The $340K Nobody Saw Coming
A client—$18M professional services firm, 60 employees—came to us because distributions kept getting smaller even though revenue was growing.
Classic growing broke pattern.
We built a 13-week cash forecast in week one. Not a complex model. Just: here's what's coming in, here's what's going out, here's where you'll land each Friday for the next quarter.
Week three of the forecast showed a problem: they had a $340K estimated tax payment due in eight weeks. Nobody had been tracking it. It wasn't in the budget because estimated taxes aren't a fixed expense. It wasn't on anyone's radar because it wasn't due yet.
Eight weeks out, they had options. They accelerated two collections. Delayed a non-critical software purchase. Restructured a vendor payment. The tax payment happened on time without drama.
What if they'd found out at two weeks instead of eight? Line of credit draw. Emergency board call. Maybe a missed payment and the penalties that follow.
The forecast didn't save them $340K. It gave them six weeks of runway to solve the problem instead of two weeks to panic about it.
That's Planning Rhythm. Not predicting the future. Seeing it early enough to change it.
Why 13 Weeks
Not 12. Not a quarter. Thirteen weeks.
Shorter than 13 weeks and you're just watching the train wreck in slow motion. You can see the wall coming but you can't stop in time.
Longer than 13 weeks and the forecast becomes fiction. Too many variables. Too much uncertainty. Easy to ignore because it feels theoretical.
At 13 weeks, you can see payroll funding gaps before they become crises. You can spot the quarter where that big contract renewal doesn't happen. You can identify the month where three annual subscriptions hit simultaneously and cash drops by $80K in a week.
More importantly: at 13 weeks, you can still act. Accelerate a collection. Delay an expense. Renegotiate a payment term. Adjust a hiring plan.
The forecast isn't information. It's a decision tool.
The Hire That Cost $400K
A CEO I worked with—$14M company, solid growth—wanted to hire a VP of Sales. Great track record. $280K total comp.
He ran the math: if she hits quota, we'll 4x her cost in new revenue. Easy yes.
I asked him what happens if she doesn't hit quota.
He looked at me like I'd asked about fortune tellers. "You can't predict these things."
He's right. You can't predict them. But you can prepare for them.
She didn't hit quota. Not even close. Took six months to realize it wasn't working, another two to manage her out. Eight months of comp, plus recruiting fees, plus the deals that didn't close, plus the pipeline that didn't build, plus the distraction.
Total cost: somewhere north of $400K. For a $14M company, that's not a rounding error. That's a quarter of their annual profit.
When I asked afterward what he would have done differently, he said: "I would have modeled the downside. I would have known what 'miss' looked like before I was in it."
That's scenario planning. Not pessimism. Preparation.
Three Scenarios, Every Time
After that, we rebuilt how he made decisions. Every major commitment gets three scenarios before approval:
The plan. What happens if this works the way we expect? This is the spreadsheet everyone already builds.
The delay. What happens if this takes 50% longer or delivers 50% less? Not a disaster—just friction. The realistic downside.
The miss. What happens if this fails entirely? We hire and she doesn't work out. We invest and the product doesn't sell. We expand and the market isn't there.
The exercise isn't about predicting which scenario happens. It's about knowing what you'll do in each one before you're in it.
Another client—$22M professional services firm—wanted to open a second office. The plan looked great: new market, existing relationships, breakeven at month 18.
Before they committed, we modeled all three.
Plan: $800K investment, breakeven at month 18, profitable by month 24. Manageable with their existing line of credit.
Delay: Breakeven at month 30 instead of 18. Additional $350K cash requirement. Did they have it? Could they get it? What would they cut to fund it?
Miss: Office never reaches breakeven. Exit cost: roughly $400K for lease termination, severance, wind-down. Plus the sunk cost.
The CEO looked at the miss scenario and paused. "We could survive that," he said. "But it would hurt. A lot."
That's the conversation you want to have before you sign the lease. Not after.
They opened the office. It hit somewhere between plan and delay—breakeven at month 22. But they went in knowing exactly what they'd do if it didn't work. No panic. No scramble. Just execution of a plan they'd already built.
The Customers Who Were Killing Them
Unit economics is the part of Planning Rhythm that makes people uncomfortable.
Because it tells you things you don't want to know.
A $24M company came to us with a familiar story: revenue growing, cash shrinking, margins eroding. They blamed the market. They blamed competition. They blamed rising costs.
We built unit economics by customer segment. Not complicated—just: what does it actually cost to serve each type of customer, fully loaded?
Three of their largest customers were underwater. Negative margin after fully-loaded cost to serve. They represented 35% of revenue and were destroying the profitability of everything else.
The CEO didn't believe it at first. "Those are our best customers," he said. "They've been with us for years."
Best by what measure? Longest relationship, yes. Most revenue, yes. Most profitable? They were literally paying to serve them.
One customer in particular: $2.1M annual contract, their biggest. Looked great on paper. But scope had crept over three years. The client expected a level of service that wasn't priced in. The team working that account had grown from four people to eleven. The contract hadn't.
Forty percent of revenue. Negative margin.
They renegotiated. The client pushed back. They held firm. The client stayed—at a price that actually made money. Two other underwater accounts they exited entirely.
Annual profit impact: north of $600K. Same revenue base, radically different cash flow.
That's unit economics. Not a report. A decision-forcing function.
What Gets Installed
Planning Rhythm has three components. They work together.
The 13-week forecast creates visibility. You see what's coming. You see when cash gets tight. You see the quarters that don't work before you're in them.
Scenario planning creates preparation. You model the downside before you commit. You know what you'll do if the plan doesn't work. You make decisions with eyes open.
Unit economics creates clarity. You know which customers make money. You know which products are worth selling. You stop subsidizing revenue that destroys value.
The sequence matters. You can't scenario plan without a forecast to plan against. You can't fix unit economics if you don't know where you'll land without the fix.
The cadence matters too. The forecast updates weekly—Friday afternoon, 30 minutes, roll it forward one week. Scenarios get built before any commitment over $50K. Unit economics get reviewed monthly, looking for drift.
It's not a project. It's a rhythm. The practice is the point.
The Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Revenue is up. Is cash up too?
If you can't answer that immediately—if you need to check, or calculate, or ask someone—you're operating in the zone where growing broke happens.
Most CEOs I work with know something is off. They feel it. The distributions that should be there aren't. The margin that should be improving isn't. The growth that should feel good feels fragile instead.
They're not wrong to feel it. They just can't see it. The systems don't surface it until the damage is done.
Planning Rhythm closes that gap. Not with better reports—with better questions, asked earlier, when you can still do something about the answers.
What Changes When It's Working
The shift is subtle at first.
"Can we afford this hire?" stops being a three-day research project and becomes a five-minute conversation. You know your forecast. You can model the scenarios in real-time. The answer comes in the room where the question gets asked.
"Should we take this deal?" has a framework now. Margin profile. Cash timing. Delivery risk. Not gut feel. Criteria.
"Are we going to make payroll?" stops being a question you ask. You know. Thirteen weeks out.
But the bigger shift is cultural.
Leaders start asking "what's the cash impact?" before they ask for approval. That's not a process change. That's a behavior change. And it happens naturally when the information is available and the rhythm is established.
At one company, I watched the VP of Sales kill his own deal. Great logo, big revenue, terrible payment terms. A year earlier, he would have celebrated the signature. Now he could see what it would do to cash. He walked away.
That's Planning Rhythm working. Not finance controlling the business. The business controlling itself, with finance as the lens.
Foundation First
Planning Rhythm is the second rhythm for a reason.
You can't build a reliable 13-week forecast if your actuals take three weeks to close. Garbage in, garbage out. The forecast is only as good as the foundation it's built on.
Foundation Rhythm creates the visibility. Daily cash position. Weekly margin tracking. 10-day close. That's the bedrock.
Planning Rhythm creates the foresight. 13-week forecast. Scenario planning. Unit economics. That's what turns visibility into action.
Intelligence Rhythm comes last. Real-time dashboards. Profitability analytics. Forward indicators. That's what turns action into speed.
The sequence isn't negotiable. Companies that try to skip to the sexy stuff—the dashboards, the analytics—without fixing the foundation first just build faster access to unreliable data.
The Uncomfortable Math
Growth that consumes more cash than it generates isn't growth. It's a countdown.
The countdown might last years. Revenue keeps climbing. Team keeps expanding. The board keeps celebrating. But underneath, the cash position erodes, the margins compress, the runway shortens.
And then one quarter it all catches up. The CEO calls his lawyer about bridge financing. The board asks hard questions about how nobody saw this coming. The company that looked like a success story becomes a turnaround project.
I've watched it happen. More than once.
The companies that win are the ones who see it early. Who build the forecast before they need it. Who model the downside before they're in it. Who know their unit economics before the underwater customers drag them down.
Same 90 days. Different outcome.
That's Planning Rhythm.
See how Planning Rhythm fits the full system →
Read about the 13-Week Forecast →
Related: Growing Broke · What If You're Wrong · Foundation Rhythm
COMPANION LINKEDIN POST
Revenue up 40%. Team doubled. Customers happy.
The CEO called me on a Tuesday. Couldn't figure out what was happening.
Distributions kept shrinking. Then stopped entirely. Then the line of credit started climbing.
"I don't understand," he said. "We're winning."
I asked when he'd last looked at his 13-week cash forecast.
Silence.
"We don't have one of those. We have an annual budget."
The annual budget said profitable.
The reality: three weeks from missing payroll.
$23M company. Six years old. 85 employees.
He couldn't make Friday's deposit without Wednesday's collection landing first.
He wasn't failing.
He was succeeding himself to death.
Here's the pattern:
Win a big deal. Extend terms to net-60. Hire before the ink dries. Agree to scope that's not in the contract.
Revenue shows up in 60 days. Costs show up immediately.
Do that fifty times and you have a crisis that looks like it came out of nowhere—but was built one "win" at a time.
Revenue is up.
Is cash up too?
If you have to check, you're in the zone where this happens.
Comment after posting:
Wrote about what Planning Rhythm actually installs—13-week forecasting, scenario planning, and the unit economics that tell you which customers are killing you. Link in bio or DM me.