Jill turned her laptop towards me late one evening in 1999 and said we had a gap of four hundred thousand pounds.
I looked at the number for a while. There is a moment when the mind tries to treat arithmetic as opinion. Numbers wait for you to catch up.
That was the year CTI made The Sunday Times Fast Track 100. We were also three weeks from missing payroll.
Both things were true at the same time. That is the part nobody tells you about a good year.
I have thought about that gap ever since. Not because of how close it came. Because of how long it had been visible before anybody in the room could see it.
We were winning bigger contracts from bigger operators, on good margins, on ninety-day terms. Some customers paid inside that. The biggest paid twenty days after it. Call it ninety days out on average. Each contract was larger than the last, so the money waiting to come back was always growing.
We had no overdraft. When we started, the bank would not give us one. Later we decided we did not want one. So the waiting was ours to do, and the four hundred thousand had nowhere to come from except the customers who owed it.
The first big contract feels like a win. By the sixth month you have paid for six months of work and been paid for three. We had become our customers’ bank without anybody deciding it. It did not look like a warning. It looked like success.
The four hundred thousand was not the gap. It was the edge of it.
None of it was hidden. The debtor days had been drifting for months. The terms had been agreed under pressure and never revisited. All of it was in a report somebody produced every month. Nobody in the room had seen this shape before. So we read it as detail rather than as a warning.
What we did about it was not clever. We chased cash, renegotiated terms, leaned on suppliers and held the business together conversation by conversation until the immediate danger passed. I took that as proof I had worked hard enough. It was three months before I understood I had been acting as the shock absorber for a model that needed redesigning, by which time I was tired in a way that sleep did not fix.
We got through it. We also closed a gap we should never have opened.
We understood it as a pattern only once it had become a crisis. That is the most expensive moment to understand anything.
Last week I wrote about evidence I explained away. This is the other failure and it is quieter. Not evidence made to mean something more comfortable. Evidence nobody in the room could read.
That is not a character flaw. It is a gap in the room. It is also the cheapest gap to close, because somebody has always seen the shape before. It just was not us.
Growth that outruns cash has a shape. So does hiring for the business you have rather than the one arriving next year. Once you have seen the shape you can see it early. Early is where all the value sits.
We arrived at that understanding the long way round, through a crisis and three months of holding the thing up. One conversation with someone who had been there would have got us to the same place before the gap opened.
Experience does not stop you making the decision. It tells you what the sixth month feels like.
I want to be careful here because this can curdle. Experience becomes habit. Pattern recognition becomes prejudice. The person who has done it before can be quietly certain about a market that has changed underneath them.
Not every old thing is wise. You are not looking for someone to obey. You are looking for better information sooner. What you do with it is still yours.
You can afford to learn one or two of these yourself. The mistakes teach you something reading cannot. What you cannot afford is to learn all of them that way. Each one is paid for in years and there are not enough of those to go around.
Field Note
The point of experience is not to explain what went wrong. It is to tell you what is about to.
Try This
Name the decision you are least sure about right now.
Then find one person who has already made it and ask them a single question: what did the sixth month look like?