Amos Ilgenfritz and the Ratchet Reckoning: Master Working Capital to Keep a Business Alive

A profitable company can still go broke. Amos Ilgenfritz is about to find out how.

The RX91 is the best robot Ilgenfritz Robotics has ever built. Sales are up. The team is proud. And the line of credit has not touched zero in over a year.

Amos has been here before. Years ago he nearly lost the company to a cash crisis he never saw coming, and he swore he had learned the lesson. He built the reports. He learned to see the cash. He thought he had it figured out.

He did not have it figured out.

The cash has crept back into the corners of the business while everyone watched the sales number. It is trapped in inventory. It is stuck out in the field with customers who have not paid. And the debt that covered the gap arrived one sensible decision at a time, until a company that looked healthy could no longer move.

Then the farm economy goes soft, and the trap snaps shut. Amos knows exactly what to do. Drop the inventory. Collect the receivables. Free the cash. He is right. And he cannot do any of it, because the very moves that would save the company would break the loan that is keeping it alive.

This is a business story you can put to work the day you finish it.

Through Amos and his company, you will learn the discipline almost no one teaches and every owner needs:

• What working capital really is, and how to calculate the cash trapped in your own business
• Why a growing, profitable company can run out of money
• How debt creeps in disguised as good decisions, and how to count what you truly owe
• How to free the cash stuck in inventory and receivables without losing customers or sales
• Why the goal was never zero debt, but slack, the room a business needs to survive a hard year

After every chapter you will find a Field Note. One page, one tool, ready to use the day you read it. Worksheets, checklists, and the exact numbers to run on your own company.

You do not need to have read the earlier books to follow this one. But if you have, you will feel right at home.

Amos Ilgenfritz and the Ratchet Reckoning is the fourth book in The Amos Ilgenfritz Series, business novels that teach the discipline of cash through the story of one company learning to survive its own success.