What is the most crucial element in business? Most people think of things like sales or profits.  The reality is a company can be profitable and also forced to close their doors.  Heard the saying “cash is king”?  It is more than a management cliche since cash flow is what drives a business.  Some entrepreneurs have built huge enterprises without cash flow, but they had access to capital…. this is still cash!  For any business to count on financing or capital infusions to stay in business is a dangerous game.

Plain and simple, do not run out of cash. In business, you can run out of just about everything; you can take backorders, crash your website, have the worst day possible, and still recover. Running out of cash is the one thing you can not do under any circumstances. The minute you do, your business is dead.

The book includes 115 ideas to improve cash flow.

Gregory Brickner is a CFO who is passionate about cash flow.

He has spent more than two decades figuring out the hard performance problems inside companies trying to reach a higher tier of growth, across healthcare, technology, and manufacturing. The work has taken him through firms on Main Street and business units inside large corporations, which turn out to share more constraints than either likes to admit. Through all of it, he has believed the same thing. Free cash flow comes first. A company that generates its own cash controls its own future. A company that does not will eventually answer to someone who does.

He likes things done fast, distrusts complexity that does not earn its keep, and when it takes six signatures to buy a cup of coffee, he goes a little nuts.

Gregory writes The Amos Ilgenfritz Series, business novels that teach the discipline of cash through the story of one company learning to survive its own success.