Slow Bleed

The Slow Bleed - why you business is running out of cash and its not a sales problem.

The CEO field guide to the one number that predicts business failure - before your P&L, your board pack, or your Big 4 advisors ever will.

Seventy per cent of business failures are profitable companies. They didn't run out of customers. They didn't run out of ideas. They ran out of cash - because nobody was measuring how fast the business converts activity into money.

Cash Conversion Velocity (CCV) is the metric that changes everything. Measured in days. Owned by name. It reveals what no dashboard, no management presentation, and no due diligence report will ever volunteer: the real operating truth of your business.

The Slow Bleed is the practitioner's field guide to measuring CCV, fixing it, and governing it. Written by Nick Ayton - forty-five years inside operating businesses across four continents, restructuring, building, and fixing the cash conversion problems that the consulting industry charges millions to diagnose and leaves you to solve.

This is not a book you read and shelve. It is a manual. A working document for founders, owners, CEOs, and board members to use every day.

Inside the book:

• 15 chapters, each ending with a CEO Action Card - five actions you take this week, not next quarter
• 75 practical actions sequenced into a 90-day implementation plan
• 16 diagnostic tools built for the meeting room, not the library
• Customer portfolio ranking by real net contribution - not revenue
• Support function accountability frameworks with CCV metrics
• Board governance model for forward-looking cash conversion reporting

CEOs, founders, and owner-managers who know their P&L looks healthy but cash feels tight. Private equity operating partners who suspect at least two portfolio companies are slowly bleeding value. Family office principals deploying capital into operating businesses who want the inside track on true performance. Board chairs and NEDs who want the five questions that reveal whether the CEO is running the business or managing a story. M&A professionals and corporate finance advisors who want the metric that's missing from every CIM. Anyone who has ever paid a Big 4 firm millions for a diagnosis that matched what they had to sell, not the problem you had.