"I have money in the bank, but my vendors are cutting off deliveries because their bills aren’t getting paid. I don’t know what’s going on."

Those were the first words the founder said to me. And I knew immediately, this wasn’t a cash problem. This was a visibility problem.

The money was there. The system wasn’t.

The founder had purchased this business with a sharp eye for numbers. Before owning it, they had spent years in corporate acquisitions in this exact industry. They knew the benchmarks cold. In a service based business, supplies should be a small fraction of your overall expenses. The number that signals a healthy, profitable operation should be well below 20% of revenue.

Their number was almost 40%. They didn’t know. Nobody had ever shown them.

When we started reviewing the financials together, the supplies number jumped out immediately. It was far too high relative to revenue. I flagged it directly. Here’s what I’m seeing. Here’s what this number is telling us. Let’s figure out why.

The answer wasn’t complicated. It was accountability. Nobody was watching what was being ordered. The team was purchasing freely, supplies were expiring before they could be used, and product was getting thrown out regularly. Not out of carelessness. Out of the absence of a system.

And at the center of it all was a stack of bills on the founder’s desk that never seemed to get smaller. Every invoice came to them for review. But they were running a business. There wasn’t time. So the pile grew, the bills waited, and the vendors stopped delivering.

I knew what was needed. Not a new hire. Not a software overhaul. A system. One where the founder wasn’t the bottleneck.

The office manager was put in charge and made accountable for one number. Bills reviewed once a week. The bookkeeper sends a simple report, one to two sentences describing each bill. She decides what gets paid based on due dates and what’s in the bank. The founder signs the checks.

That’s it.

The stack of bills disappeared practically overnight. The FedEx overnight checks to get emergency supplies, gone. The vendor shutoffs, gone. The team could finally do their jobs again.

Supplies dropped from 37% to 22% of revenue in year one, a savings of $670,000. Then down to 15% in year two, an additional $279,000 kept in the business. And it never went back up.

Nearly $950,000 kept in the business in two years. Simply by finding the leak, identifying exactly where the money was going, and putting one person accountable for it.

So if you’re curious about the kind of ROI a CFO-level strategist can bring, this is just one example. And that’s not including the $125,000 in tax savings from last week. This is one client.

The gap isn’t in your team. It’s in who’s watching the relationship between your revenue and what it costs you to deliver it. A bookkeeper and a CPA don’t fill that seat. And sometimes you’re too busy to see it.

Next week I’ll share what four years of watching the right numbers consistently does to a business. Stay curious.

A Financial Clarity Session is a free session where we get to know each other, see if we are the right fit, and look at where you are and what you actually need. We’ll know by the end of that session what the right next step is.

You can book yours at AudreyFaust.as.me/FinancialClarity.

The only CFO-trained strategist who partners with women business owners at $250K–$3M to scale their business by mastering their numbers, their relationship with money, and leading as an empowered CEO.