Often a struggling business will say they're experiencing cashflow problems. Crudely, from a cashflow point of view, you can divide businesses into three groups:
- Businesses that get paid by customers before they have to pay their suppliers (which might include staff, rent and the like, as well as just the cost of the things they sell to their customers).
- Businesses that get paid by customers at about the same time as they pay their suppliers.
- Businesses that have to pay their suppliers before they get paid by their customers.
A category 3 business might have a cashflow problem - if you need to pay your staff and suppliers to create something, and then wait six months for the customer to pay you for it, you might well have a cashflow problem. But if a business in category 1 or 2 says that they've got a cashflow problem then they're usually in denial. What they've got is most likely a profit problem. The cashflow is at worst following the profits, and they're not enough. Either that, or their problem is that the profits/cashflow might be enough in other circumstances, but aren't enough to sustain this particular owner's demand for income (which is either another profit problem or a lifestyle problem, depending on which way you look at it - it's still not remotely a cashflow problem).
Unless you're in a business where you've got a substantial lag between paying suppliers and getting paid by customers, think very hard before characterising your issue as a cashflow one, because that's probably not the real issue and there's something more important that you need to face up to and engage with.