Places your business needs to be more financially fit

You don’t have a money problem. You have a visibility problem.

Hi y’all,

I talk to event business owners constantly, and here’s what I’ve noticed: the questions are almost always the same. Where is my money? What stage is it in? Where should I be investing it? How do I get more of it, faster?

You already have access to the info you want to know. The problem is that the answers are scattered across spreadsheets, QuickBooks, email threads, and memory — and pulling the narrative together takes more energy than it’s worth.

So before you go hunting for new reports to run or dashboards to build, I want to reframe how to think about financial fitness. Start from the problem and work backwards.

Not “here’s a list of reports I need.” More like: what is the thing that’s costing me money, time, or sleep right now? Is cash flow inconsistent because of seasonality? Are your P&Ls off because you’re underpricing? Is year-over-year growth stalling and you can’t figure out why?

Once you name the problem, you can go find the data. And if you can’t find the data, that tells you something too. It means you’ve got a system gap to close first.

Here’s the framework I’d use:

• If you can name the problem → go find the data that helps you understand it.
• If you know something’s off but can’t pinpoint it → check your systems for end-to-end visibility first, so you’re not guessing at which part of the pipeline is broken.
• If your systems are in place and you’re still stuck → go part by part: top-line revenue, executing on that revenue, collecting it, then how you’re spending it.

The owners I’ve seen fix this fastest are the ones who got clear on what they needed to know, and what they’d do with it.

See you next Monday,

Mallory Mullen
Goodshuffle