CEO @ Alex the CFO | Empowering CEOs with Data-Driven Financial Strategies | Creator of the AI CFO
Joined September 2011
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A number on its own tells you nothing.
The same number next to last week's tells you where you're going.
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By the time a number feels wrong, it already went wrong weeks ago.
So I built a report that catches it Monday morning, before I feel a thing.
The anatomy:
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Your P&L won't show you this.
Revenue up 40%.
Pipeline full.
Everything looks great.
Then you miss payroll.
Not because the business is broken. Because cash is leaving before it arrives.
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I've witnessed CEOs trying to change their business.
But not all try to change the version of themselves running it.
Strategy changes are easy. New plans, new tools, new goals.
But under pressure, most leaders revert to the same patterns:
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Two questions every founder should ask:
1. How many days pass between when customers pay you and when you pay suppliers?
2. What's your daily revenue?
Multiply them. That's your float - or your bleed.
If that number is negative, you're burning cash even while growing.
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You can never escape broken unit economics.
Take our Free Finance Function Assessment, and evaluate ALL your financials:
alexthecfo.com/share/wheel-a…
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Founders who never run out of cash all understand this one thing.
I've seen the pattern across 45+ companies and hundreds of millions in revenue.
Revenue and cash are not the same...
Here's how a "great month" turns into a cash crisis:
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This is the advice I'd give every founder.
After 14 years in entrepreneurship, here's what keeps coming back:
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You're making million-dollar decisions with thousand-dollar data.↓
(And it's not your fault.)
Nobody taught founders how to build a finance function.
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I made our internal finance diagnostic public.
(Our head accountant will probably kill me for this.)
After years of using it with clients, we’ve finally released "The Scalable Finance Wheel Assessment".
It’s a 15-minute diagnostic designed to do one thing well:
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Most people think strategy is about ideas. When it’s actually mostly about allocation.
Every company has more ideas than it can fund.
More opportunities than it can pursue.
More problems than it can solve at once.
Strategy begins the moment you accept that.
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After 8 years, Alex the CFO is stepping into its next chapter.
Our new website is live, and not as a cosmetic update, but as a clearer reflection of the work we actually do today.
Over the years, our work has naturally gravitated toward companies where:
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When you don’t know where you stand, every decision feels heavier than it should.
Clarity doesn’t remove risk, but it removes unnecessary stress.
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Finance is so simple early on in a company...
You might have one entity. One or two bank accounts. One P&L. One person making the big decisions.
You can “feel” the business. And have a complete, bird-eye view on everything happening.
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One of the hardest things I’ve learned to do is "not to overcorrect".
In business, signals never stop coming.
A bad week.
A missed target.
A comment from an investor.
A competitor doing something new.
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