What goes wrong when you spend deposits straight away?
When a customer pays a deposit, it feels like the responsible move to immediately buy everything the job needs. You have the materials ready, nothing is owed to suppliers, and the job looks set up perfectly. The problem is you have turned liquid cash into a pile of aluminium or steel sitting in the workshop.
That material cannot pay wages. If a slow week hits and no new invoices come in, there is nothing in the account to cover payroll. Bailey McKeown-Unicomb describes exactly this situation: as his team grew, a week without an invoice or deposit coming in meant he had no money to pay the boys. There were several periods where the business only just scraped through.
Why does this get worse as you add staff?
When you are a sole trader, a cash flow gap hurts you personally but the damage is contained. The moment you have a team, payroll goes out every single week whether you have been paid or not. Your money is leaving the business on a fixed schedule, but money coming in can be irregular.
The only way out of a cash squeeze when your cash is already locked up in materials is to finish the job, but finishing the job requires paying staff you cannot afford to pay. It is a trap that tightens the more people you employ.
What is the fix?
Hold the deposit in cash until roughly one to two weeks before the job is scheduled to start. At that point, order the materials and send files to the laser cutter or supplier. The job still starts on time, the customer experience does not change, but your bank account holds a growing buffer between payments.
Bailey says that as soon as he made this change, the accounts grew noticeably and the business started running well. The shift itself is simple. The discipline is sitting on money that feels like it should be spent.
How does this connect to keeping staff paid?
Cash is flexible. Materials are not. If a tax bill arrives, a wholesaler needs paying, or a staff member has an emergency, cash gives you options. A workshop full of pre-bought materials gives you none.
Greg Allan makes the same point from his own experience: he had cash in the bank, spent it on a home renovation without registering it as tax money, and then the quarterly tax bill arrived. The cash was gone, converted into something illiquid. The principle is the same whether the money disappears into materials for a job or into something personal: once it leaves liquid form, you have lost your flexibility.
What else helps cash flow as the business grows?
One move Bailey credits with improving throughput, and indirectly cash flow, is hiring a non-billable CAD designer. It felt like a cost that would not make money. In practice, it streamlined the entire build process so that a job which once took a week now takes two days. Faster builds mean faster completion, faster invoicing, and faster cash coming back in.
The broader lesson is that holding cash is not just about where you park a deposit. It is about having enough slack in the business that one slow week does not put you in a position where you cannot meet your obligations. Investing in people and systems that speed up production is one of the levers that keeps the cycle moving.
What does good cash flow actually feel like day to day?
Bailey describes the earlier period as a constant state of stress, working seven days a week, twelve to fourteen hour days, and still feeling like the business was on a knife edge. The cash flow pressure was a big part of that stress.
With the deposit practice in place and a team running production, his days now have structure: business planning in the morning, time in the workshop with the team, then admin and invoicing at the end of the day. The business moved to a nine-day fortnight, something the team welcomed. The difference between the two periods comes down to having systems, cash included, that mean you are not reacting to a crisis every week.
