Growth, Actually | Chapter 2: The Human Balance Sheet
Profit buys you options. People keep you alive.
Last time we argued that profit is not small thinking. It is long thinking. It buys you time, leverage and better terms. This chapter looks at the quiet thing that can still undo all of that. People. Not because people are unreliable, but because growing companies concentrate knowledge, access and decision making in too few heads. Numbers sit still. People do not. When plans meet real life, it is the human weak points that bend first.
You have seen versions of this. The only person who can close the quarter goes off sick. The salesperson with the entire pipeline in a notebook resigns. A founder leaves and no one can agree what happens to their shares. None of this shows up in a neat KPI until it does. Then it lands like a plot twist.
Where it usually snaps
Momentum hides fragility. When things are up and to the right, shortcuts feel clever. Knowledge lives in chats. Handovers live in good intentions. The first wobble is not a number. It is a person who is unavailable at the wrong moment. That is why the human balance sheet matters. Cash gives you runway. People give you the ability to use it.
Say these four questions out loud, in a room, with names on a whiteboard.
Who are our true single points of failure?
What if they are unavailable for three months?
What happens to ownership and control if a founder dies or is critically ill?
How long could we pay people, including ourselves, before the company starts to wobble?
If the answers are woolly, you have risk. That is not a verdict. It is a to do list.
The resilience stack
Think in three layers. Keep it simple on purpose. You are not building bureaucracy. You are buying durability.
Process. Reduce dependency. Write down the ten processes that let you trade for ninety days. Move the sales pipeline out of heads and into a system anyone competent could pick up. Give every critical function a shadow who can deliver a credible version B. Document just enough to make the next person dangerous. Good enough beats heroic.
Cash. Buy time. Three months of payroll in reserve is a superpower. Put a key person offline scenario into your model and watch what breaks. Where does cash tighten. Which commitments would you delay. Pre agree a trim plan you would actually follow. Cut once, cleanly, rather than five times in panic.
Protection. Transfer catastrophe. Start with key person cover for the roles your revenue leans on. If one of them is suddenly offline, the payout buys time to steady the plan and hire well. For founders and senior staff, add Relevant Life to provide personal life cover through the company in a typically tax-efficient wrapper, with premiums paid by the business and benefits paid to a trust.
We bring in PIL, who size the cover, set up the trust, place the policy with the right insurer, and handle reviews and renewals so the paperwork matches your cap table and founder agreements.
The traps we keep seeing
First comes the after the raise idea. It sounds efficient. It is not. Costs get pushed into a future that never arrives because something else is always louder. If it matters, price it into the round. It is cheaper than a deal that slips.
Next is founder only thinking. When revenue, relationships or the roadmap live in one head, that person becomes your single point of failure. Share the load before life forces the issue. Spread access. Move logins out of pockets and into a vault. Write the three line version of how this thing works.
Then there are the phantom clauses. If the buyback or cross option is not written and signed, it does not exist. Paper it now while everyone likes each other. Future you will be very grateful.
Finally, the false economy. Saving a few hundred a month on protection while burning tens of thousands on growth is not frugal. It is wishful. The cheapest time to buy resilience is before you need it.
What good looks like
It is not flashy. It is a rhythm. Sales lives in a system with fields that are actually filled. Ops has one page that explains how work moves from intake to invoice. Finance can close month end in ten days because people know who does what and when. There is a short sheet that lists the five scary scenarios and what the first day of each looks like. The cap table matches reality. The founder agreements are readable. The insurance folder contains things that are active rather than policies from last year.
Inside that rhythm there is room for ambition. People can take holidays without apology. A new joiner can roll into a process that makes sense. The business is brave because it is not brittle.
A half a day that pays for itself
Run a short audit. Two columns. Function and name. Circle any function with one name only. For each circle, write three actions you would take if that person was out for ninety days. Open the founder agreements and check leaver provisions and cross options and what triggers them. List the protections you already hold, the sums insured and the renewal dates. Open the model and create a key person offline scenario. How long do you stay solvent. Now book an hour to fix two things. Then book another hour next month. Progress beats perfection.
If you want outside eyes, bring them in for a targeted sweep. A good specialist will translate risk into plain English and give you a short list that actually gets done. Quiet work. Loud results.
Start here this week
Write down what you are building and who else can do it. Move the pipeline into a system. Give one critical function a shadow. Build the key person offline scenario and talk through the first two weeks. Book the paperwork you have been avoiding. None of this is glamorous. All of it is growth.
Profit is not a dirty word. Protection is not either. One gives you freedom. The other buys you the time to use it. Look after your numbers. Look after your people. That is how you keep the lights on when the world gets messy, and how you earn the right to write the next chapter.
