Investment, working capital and marketing all pull from the same bank account. I rarely see them discussed in the same room, and the runway usually ends up deciding for everyone.

Here is something I see in almost every growth company I work with.

The product roadmap gets decided in one meeting. Payment terms get decided somewhere else, usually by whoever is closest to the contract, often in the last hour of a negotiation. And the marketing budget gets decided in a third meeting, based on a channel model and a CAC number.

Three meetings. One bank account.

I think that is the whole problem, right there. Every krone you spend on growth comes out of the same balance, and you only get to spend it once. But nothing in a normal board pack shows those three decisions up against each other. So they never actually compete. They get approved one at a time, each one perfectly sensible on its own, and you only see the total when you look at the bank three months later.

Three things fighting over the same money

Strip away the labels and there are really only three ways to turn cash into future revenue.

Capacity. Engineers, salespeople, a warehouse, a new market. The stuff that shows up in the plan as headcount and capex. Slow to build, slower to undo.

Working capital. The cash that gets stuck in the business just because it is growing. Invoices you have sent but not collected. Stock you have bought but not sold. Nobody asks for this money. It disappears anyway.

Demand. Paid ads, content, events, SDRs. The most visible of the three, the most measured, and by far the easiest to switch off.

Only two of them ever get a budget line. The one in the middle is why companies with a good plan still run out of cash.

Your P&L is hiding the fight

If you steer by the P&L, these three barely see each other. Accounting smooths them out on purpose.

Capex gets capitalised, so a big cash payment turns into a small monthly depreciation line. Stock sits on the balance sheet until it sells, so buying it does not show up as a cost at all. Prepaid marketing gets spread across the year.

So the P&L can look completely calm while the cash position swings around. That is not accounting being wrong. It is doing exactly what it was built to do. It is just the wrong document to allocate cash with.

The two questions I would ask every proposal

Whatever meeting it came out of, I would put every growth proposal through the same two questions.

When does this come back as cash? Not payback on contribution margin. Actual money, in the bank, after everything you had to pay to get it.

How deep does the hole get first? The worst cash position it creates, and which month that lands in.

Two proposals with identical returns can answer those very differently, and it is usually down to something nobody thought of as a financial decision. Here is what I mean.

Say you sell a EUR 20,000 annual contract at 80% gross margin, and it costs you EUR 12,000 all in to win one. You want 50 new customers this year, so you put EUR 600,000 behind it.

Bill annually up front and those 50 customers bring in EUR 1,000,000 during the year. Take off the EUR 600,000 you spent winning them and roughly EUR 108,000 of delivery cost, and the plan is cash positive by just under EUR 300,000. It pays for itself.

Bill monthly instead and the same 50 customers, same margin, same acquisition cost, bring in around EUR 542,000 in the same twelve months. Because on average each one only bills for part of the year. Now the plan eats about EUR 166,000 instead of generating EUR 292,000.

That is a swing of more than EUR 450,000. Nothing changed about the strategy, the pricing or the efficiency. Just the billing term, set by whoever wrote the contract template.

Which is exactly why I want all three in the same room. For that company, the best cash decision on the table is not the marketing budget at all. It is the invoice.

What it looks like when you fund all three at once

Peloton is the clearest recent example, and the thing I find interesting is that every single decision made sense at the time.

In February 2022 they announced they were winding down Peloton Output Park, the factory they had planned in Ohio. It cost around USD 60 million in restructuring capex to stop building a factory that never opened. The same announcement cut about 2,800 roles, took roughly USD 150 million out of planned capex for the year, and targeted at least USD 800 million of annual cost savings.

By the fourth quarter of that financial year, reported in August, revenue was USD 678.7 million, down 28%. The quarterly net loss was USD 1.24 billion. Inventory sat at USD 1.1 billion, and connected fitness gross margin came in at negative 98.1%, mostly because of a USD 182.3 million increase in inventory reserves.

Capacity, stock and demand generation had all been sized for one growth rate. Then the growth rate changed.

I do not think the lesson is that they spent too much. It is that all three bets were riding on the same forecast, and nothing in how the decisions were structured made that obvious until the forecast broke.

What I would actually do

You do not need a new system for this. Four habits will do it.

Put all three in one cash budget. Capacity, working capital and demand, funded from one opening balance, reviewed every quarter. If one wants more, it has to say which of the other two gives it up.

Make every proposal show cash payback and the deepest hole. Two extra fields on whatever template you already use. Just filling them in kills more bad ideas than any approval process I have seen.

Give working capital an owner. It is the only one of the three with no natural sponsor, which is exactly why it drifts. Someone should own DSO and stock the way your marketing lead owns CAC.

Decide now what you cut, and in what order. Agree it while nothing is on fire. If collections slip two weeks, or a quarter lands 20% short, what stops? A cut you planned is a decision. A cut you make in the moment is a reaction, and reactions tend to hit whatever is easiest rather than whatever is right.

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The bottom line

Growth is not free, and the expensive bit usually does not have a budget line.

If you take one thing from this, work out what your own payment terms are costing you before you approve the next growth budget. For a lot of companies, the cheapest growth capital they will ever find is already sitting in their contracts.

At Scaleup Finance we help founders and finance teams get all three onto one page, so the trade-off is a choice rather than something you discover in the bank balance. If that sounds useful, we would love to talk.