This is a question I sometimes ask when I think about what advice I would give myself. What would I do if I were the owner of a business that had done well for fifteen years, accumulated a meaningful amount of money, and now had to decide what to do with it?
It is a useful exercise, because it forces me to set aside the answers I would give a client and think about the question the way an actual owner does. Which is to say, less cleanly than the textbooks suggest.
Here is roughly what I would do.
The first thing I would do is nothing. For about a month.
I know that sounds counterintuitive, given that the whole point of having a strategic CFO is to make decisions faster, not slower. But there is a specific reason. Money that has taken ten or fifteen years to accumulate has a particular psychological weight to it, and the instinct most owners have when they finally turn their attention to it is to deploy it quickly so they feel like they are doing something. That instinct is responsible for more bad decisions than almost any other in business ownership. The deposit on a property that did not need to be bought. The growth move that was not really thought through. The investment that someone recommended at a barbecue.
So I would sit with it. Not forever. Long enough to make sure the eventual decision was made out of clarity, not out of the discomfort of having an unanswered question on the desk.
The second thing I would do is admit that I did not know what the money was for.
This is the part most owners skip, and it is the part that determines whether everything that follows is any good. Money sitting in a business account is doing one of three things, and they are not the same thing. It is either reserves for a downturn that has not happened. Or it is dry powder for a move that has not been decided on. Or it is wealth that should have been moved out of the business but has not been. Until I had honestly named which of those three it was, every other decision would be premature.
If I am being candid, the answer in most cases is the third one. The money is wealth. It is being treated as reserves, or as future capital, because both of those framings let the owner avoid the conversation about whether they should be moving it somewhere else. Reserves is the more comfortable story. Wealth is the more accurate one.
The third thing I would do is take the structure question seriously.
Money inside the trading company is exposed to the trading company. That is fine if it is genuinely there for the business. It is not fine if it is wealth that ended up inside the trading company because nobody moved it out. The rules on this have shifted in the last few years and what was the right structure five years ago is not necessarily the right structure now. I would not assume the setup I had was current. I would have it looked at properly, by someone whose actual job it is to know.
The fourth thing I would do is make a call.
Not the optimal call. A defensible one. Because the thing I have come to believe, after watching this play out across a lot of businesses, is that the owners who end up wealthy are not the ones who made the best possible decisions. They are the ones who made reasonable decisions, moved, and then made the next one. The owners who are still sitting on the same pile of cash five years later are usually still waiting for the answer to feel obvious.
The answer is not going to feel obvious. The market is uncertain. The structures are complicated. The tax position keeps shifting. None of that is going to resolve itself into clarity. Waiting for it to is the most expensive form of patience there is.
The fifth thing I would do is have the conversation underneath the conversation.
Because the question of what to do with the money is never actually the real question. The real question is what I want the next twenty years to look like. How much do I want to have. What do I want it to be doing. What does the next chapter of my life cost. Until I had answered those questions, any decision about the money would be a guess.
That is the bit most owners do not realise they are avoiding. They think they are stuck on the money question. They are actually stuck on the questions underneath it. The money is just the place where the avoidance has become visible.
Those would be the five things I would do.
If you are sitting on a pile of cash that has been there longer than it should have been, the order of operations is more or less the same regardless of the number.
It is not urgent. None of these things ever are.
That is exactly why they are worth bringing forward.
Murray.
