Fabrizio Moreira Quotes

I've certainly learnt there's nothing more important than cash - cash flow issues are one of the biggest causes of company failures.

A small business can survive for a while without making a profit, but if its cashflow dries up, the impact is fatal.

You have to manage money. Particularly with market economies. You may have a great product, but if your bottom line goes bust, then that's it.

Small businesses have told us that having cash in their pocket is one of the primary things that they need.

If the cash runs out, it's like a heart attack for you and your business. Keep that front and centre of your mind, and you will have financial security and not be struggling to pay the bills.

No matter what business you're in, business is business, and financing and money are critical. I would have made a lot fewer mistakes if I had more schooling in that area.

Starting out, iRobot was not an economic rocket ship. It took six and a half years before we had enough money in the bank at the beginning of each month to make payroll. We always made it - we paid salaries at the end of the month, and I always had four weeks to figure things out.

You can make great money in a utility type of business by borrowing cheaply and lending sensibly but that's not what's being done.

With the world changing fast, we needed capital for investments. There's only so much bandwidth in your own balance sheet.

If you don’t balance your budget in business, you go out of business.

Most entrepreneurs come up with a product, or they come up with an idea and they think they can be successful with it. But if they don't know the financial side of their business and understand credit and working capital and what it takes money-wise, you can't be successful. The product is just a product.

The first aspect of a business that you need to make it work well is money. Once the money aspect is flowing, you can freely work on other aspects.

If companies don't know that they can run out of money, they won't be thinking of ways not to run out of money.

I worked for twenty-some years with no capital, so I never had any liquidity. Managing my loans alone wouldn't do it, and working hard twenty-four hours a day seven days a week alone wouldn't do it. You have to be properly capitalized.

I can tell you that when you're counting every penny, knowing that you are a single bad decision away from bankruptcy, you inevitably lose focus on what really matters for your business.

For a number of major companies, if you can't access the commercial markets, you can't fund your business. That's a big problem. You can't pay your bills.

Banking gives you a glimpse into what makes companies succeed and what makes companies fail.

One, I love the creativity. I love the ability to create a capital structure that is appropriate for a company, no matter what field it happens to be in.

The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and income statements are fiction, cash flow is reality.

My major task was to keep us solvent.

I'm not saying M.B.A.s can't be great entrepreneurs. They can. But you don't need a degree to figure out it's costing you $5,000 per month to run your business, so you need $30,000 to keep it going for six more months.

Most small-business owners have no financial education when they started. They weren't trained to be entrepreneurs.

I've made a payroll. I know what it's like to execute a business plan. I know what it's like to expect the proper return on investment... and I know you can't spend your way out of debt.

If you don't have a VP Finance on your team reporting to you, do yourself, your team, and your investors a favor and go hire one right now.

The best thing we can do to help small-business owners succeed is cut spending.