The Death of Cheap Money - Ep 90

Your accountant tells you it's your most positive year in a while. Every headline tells you the country is going under. Which one do you believe?

One of us just doubled his floor space after six flat months. The other is about to move into a warehouse five times bigger than the one he's bursting out of, and his best metric is about to drop through the floor. Episode 91 opens with the wins. Charlie has the keys to the unit next door, completed at 5pm on a Friday and moved in on the Monday, with three months rent free and 87 days for the new space to start paying its way. Matt's business made page three of the Manchester Evening News on the day the Holland's Country Clothing store opened, and one reader drove straight over because he used to do the milk round with Matt's grandfather. Then the number that frames the whole episode. Matt's warehouse turns over £5,429.60 per square foot. Move into the new building with the same revenue and it falls to £1,085.92. Charlie runs the sum on his own unit and doesn't love the answer. The British Business Fact of the Week is James Dyson's 5,127 prototypes, and there's a proper look at leasing versus buying, why agents say nobody is buying commercial property right now, and the question Charlie's accountant asked before he signed. Claude's Question of the Week asks how you make peace with signing for the person you intend to become. Matt has made a bet like this before and it didn't go to plan. Charlie explains the reason he won't settle for staying small, and it isn't the one you'd expect. 📊 Revenue per square foot shows how hard your space is working, and a move resets it overnight 🧠 More space isn't a reward for doing well, it's a statement of what you intend to build 🎯 Give new space a deadline to pay for itself, Charlie's is 87 days 💷 Buying ties up cash that could be fuelling growth, leasing keeps it working for you 🚩 Know your worst case before you sign, the size of the gamble is relative to the size of the business

Every business is carrying something it should have dealt with years ago. Most owners know exactly what theirs is. Charlie leads with fix it, fund it or flog it, and the question underneath it: what are you still carrying that you probably should not be? He puts his own on the table straight away. The stationery side of the business, the part his dad started in 1989, still running its own vans and doing daily local drops, and no longer standing on its own two feet. Three national wholesalers have become one. Matt refuses to let him flog it. His argument is that it is not a dying arm, it is an under-leveraged one. Every workwear customer should be buying stationery and the other way round, and the thing killing the margin is the van rather than the pens. Then he turns it on himself, with the service company he could be scaling and has chosen not to, and the decision he made years ago to kill off the markets that were seventy percent of turnover. The back half is stock. Charlie's eight bottles of pandemic hand sanitiser, three years on a shelf. Matt on the barn with hay in one end, stock going into skips, and the argument about mouldy jackets. The point that lands hardest is an accounting one: if it has not sold in six months it is worth what someone will pay today, not what you paid for it. Wins of the week are worth staying for. The first ever paid order through the new Workwear Innovation site, logo uploaded and embroidery paid for without a human touching it, and a stock bottleneck at the store fixed by someone in the warehouse asking an obvious question. Then the question of the week, in two parts, and Matt's answer to the second one is more honest than most owners would manage. Takeaways: 📊 What a proper product line analysis almost always finds sitting at the bottom 🧠 Fix it, fund it or flog it, and why most owners quietly choose none of the three 🚩 If it has not sold in six months it is worth what someone will pay today, not what you paid 🤝 Why the van, not the product, is often the thing killing the margin 🎯 Name the part of the business you have been avoiding the decision about Chapters: Chapters: (00:00) Shades, a teapot and low calorie breadsticks (02:02) Episode 89, and how trade is going (05:33) Doing a lot with not very much (07:56) Back from France, and the pull of old habits (09:50) Jacob Lockwood's new toy (11:10) Win of the Week: first paid order through the new site (12:41) Why Charlie has not promoted the site yet (17:24) It does not need to be perfect, it needs to be live (18:51) Matt: fixing the stock flow into the store (19:49) DPD twice a week versus running your own van (21:19) Fix it, fund it or flog it (22:07) Where Abacus Repro actually came from (23:20) The part of the business Charlie has been carrying (25:31) Three stationery wholesalers down to one (27:51) Matt: do not flog it, cross sell it (31:35) Why Charlie has clung on for five years (38:27) What Matt could be scaling and is choosing not to (42:12) Killing the markets that were 70 percent of turnover (44:30) Eight bottles of pandemic hand sanitiser (45:15) A barn with hay in one end, and stock in skips (48:24) Drawing sheets, nibs and a scanner nobody uses (51:50) Walking past problems, including people (53:05) Claude's Question of the Week (54:17) Net realisable value, and what your stock is really worth Follow Matt: 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/mrmattholland/ 👨‍💻 LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmattholland/ 📱 TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@mrmattholland ❌ X - https://x.com/mrmattholland1 Follow Charlie: 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theworkwearexpert 👨‍💻 LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-smith-1a55295b/

You can be surrounded by staff, co-directors and customers and still be the only one carrying it. Matt reckons most owners know exactly how that feels. Matt takes the lead on founder loneliness, and he is honest about his own. He runs the business with Rob and Sarah, but when something goes wrong it lands on him. The fact behind it is a December 2025 YouGov survey for the British Business Bank's Start Up Loans Company: 44 percent of UK smaller business owners have felt lonely or isolated running their business, rising to 56 percent for those with under ten staff. Only 38 percent do anything about it by connecting with other business leaders. Charlie admits organised networking leaves him cold and he gets far more from reaching out directly. Matt's counter is that it was never the organisation, it is the people you meet through it, and he tells the story of a lunch that was meant to be about one specific opportunity and turned into a relationship with a man who has built and sold three companies. They also get into why hearing other owners say the same things out loud was such a relief to both of them, and Matt's theory that the better you get at this, the weirder you are. The other half of the problem is delegation. The Sinclair rule on what your time is actually worth, a job passed down the chain twice in one morning, and Matt's view that his real bottleneck is not having enough people to hand things to. Then the question of the week: when did you last spend real time or money on growing yourself rather than your business. Matt's answer to what comes after it is the most exposed he has been on this show. Takeaways: 📊 44 percent of UK smaller business owners have felt lonely or isolated, rising to 56 percent under ten staff 🧠 It is never the networking organisation that helps, it is the people you meet through it 🤝 The Sinclair rule: if someone can do the job for less than your hourly rate, they should be doing it ⚖️ Why your business partner cannot be your only sounding board 🎯 When did you last spend real time or money on growing yourself and not your business? Holland's Country Clothing store opening, Lowes Farm, Friday 25th. All welcome, just drop Matt a message on Instagram if you are coming.

Nearly two in five business owners could not tell you whether they made money last month. More than one in five are too embarrassed to ask. Charlie leads with a Xero survey of a thousand UK small business owners. Thirty eight percent did not know whether the previous month had been profitable. Fifty five percent were struggling with cash flow. Twenty two percent were too afraid to ask a financial question because they felt they should already know the answer. Charlie's first response is to admit he and Tom probably sit in all three. Matt walks through what his month end actually looks like, and the distinction that comes out of it is the useful part. Management accounts confirm what happened. KPIs are how you navigate in between. He names his three, and explains why advertising spend gets watched every single day. Then the practical half. How much accounting rigour a business needs at each stage, why management accounts built on unreconciled data are worse than none, and why Matt reckons his own finance team is the weakest part of his business. Charlie finishes with two questions: what number have you obsessed over that turned out to mean nothing, and what number do you know you should be watching and are not. Matt's answer to the second is one most owners will recognise.