Cashflow Is King: Why Every Business Must Tell Its Financial StorySummary:

Don’t grow broke. Safeguard your company’s future and increase its value by understanding the whole picture and making the complicated simple. Do this by measuring, charting and planning how you’re going to get from A to B in a way that everyone can follow and they can get excited about. It’s about the numbers showing up in human benefit for all stakeholders.

Cash: one of the four essential elements you need to scale a business successfully. But how do you ensure you have what you need so you don’t grow broke?

According to global expert Alan Miltz, it’s time to talk numbers – but in a way that everyone will understand and care about. Not everyone on the board can be a specialist in finance but with Alan’s approach and tools to hand, all heads at the table can have a clear picture of where the company is going and their role in getting it there.

In other words, once we understand the rules of the game, we can play it better.

Show Notes

In this podcast discussion with Alan Miltz – Co-author of Scaling Up, Co-founder of Cash Flow Story and Sparks host Phil Rose you’ll learn:

• The four chapters of your cashflow story. Are you one of the 40% stuck on chapter one?
• Why you should know about the seven levers of improvement and the secret to flipping every one green.
• Why your proficiency with ‘soft’ skills has an impact on hard cash and how the three traits of a great leader will help you to grow your company faster and sell it for more.
• How the Power of One drives autonomy and accountability to strengthen the collective.
• Why volume of sales could be damaging your cashflow and what you can do about it.
• How we can mind the gap between where we are now and where we want to go.

‘You can survive with decent people, decent energy and decent execution, but run out of cash and it’s game over’, the chartered accountant, turned entrepreneur, turned global speaker says.

The role of CFO is ‘not about reporting, it’s about improvement,’ he continues. ‘The numbers belong to everyone.’

Alan’s a specialist in making the complex simple and we love the way he talks about the mathematics of business in a way that everyone can understand. This is a call for leaders and founders everywhere to have a more grounded, integrated approach across the board so that we can all win at the numbers game – and sleep better at night.

Key Insights:

• Cashflow isn’t just about survival—it’s the language of business value.
• Most entrepreneurs don’t understand their financials well enough to make confident decisions. Alan shows them how.
• “Cash Flow Story” simplifies complex financials into a story any leader can understand and act on.
• Purpose and clarity in numbers unlocks strategy, leadership, and scalability.
• Startups often struggle due to cashflow ignorance; even growth-stage businesses face value erosion without financial storytelling.

💡 Memorable Quotes:

“Profit is an opinion. Cash is a fact.”

“If you don’t understand your numbers, you don’t understand your business.”

“The secret to scaling is not in more sales—it’s in managing your cash cycle.”

Texts mentioned:

Scaling Up – Verne Harnish, Alan Miltz et al.

More about Alan

Find Helen Nicholson at:

Alan Miltz is the global authority on financial storytelling, cash flow strategy, and business valuation.

As co-author of the best-selling book Scaling Up (the Financial Chapter) and creator of the Cash Flow Story platform, Alan has helped over 30,000 businesses and 500 banks globally transform their understanding and management of profit, cash, and value.

He’s a sought-after speaker for the Entrepreneurs' Organization, Young Presidents' Organization, the TEC Forum, and Scaling Up. He serves as a board member across industries, helping leadership teams simplify financial decisions and scale smarter.

Cash Flow Story is a powerful financial storytelling platform built to help business owners, CFOs, and advisors make sense of their numbers—fast. With just four pages and three key cash flow metrics, CFS simplifies financial reporting and helps leadership teams drive better decisions.

Trusted by leading banks, advisors, and thousands of businesses worldwide, it brings clarity to the most important question in business: ‘Where is the cash?’.

Learn more at www.cashflowstory.com

Learn More:

§ Visit the Ignium website

§ Subscribe for more exclusive content in the Ignium Spark Tank here

§ Listen to the show here

Keywords in this episode:

Cashflow story

Scaling Up