Most of the companies I sit with in Dunwoody are profitable. That is rarely the thing that brings them to me. What brings them to me is that the profit shows up in March, disappears by July, and nobody in the building can explain the gap.
I have been doing this work in metro Atlanta long enough to see the same five habits repeat across wildly different businesses. A plumbing outfit in Chamblee and a two-partner design studio in Buckhead will make identical mistakes for completely different reasons. Here they are, roughly in the order they cost people money.
1. Treating the bookkeeping as the plan
Your books tell you what already happened. A plan tells you what you expect to happen and what you will do if it doesn’t. Those are two different documents, and I meet owners every month who only have the first one.
The tell is easy to spot. Ask an owner what revenue they expect in the fourth quarter and watch whether they open QuickBooks or open a spreadsheet. If the answer lives in the accounting software, there is no forecast, only a rear-view mirror with very good resolution.
A workable forecast for a company under twenty people does not need to be elaborate. Thirteen weeks of expected cash in, expected cash out, and the running balance. Update it Friday morning. That is the whole exercise, and it takes about forty minutes once the template exists.
2. Confusing the operating account with the tax account
Georgia asks for estimated payments four times a year. April, June, September, January. Federal wants the same rhythm. Every owner knows this and a startling number of them still pay the September bill out of whatever happens to be sitting in the operating account that week.
Then a big invoice comes in late, and suddenly a routine tax payment becomes a decision about payroll.
The fix is mechanical, which is why I like it. Open a second checking account. Move a fixed percentage of every deposit into it the day the deposit clears. Never spend from it. The percentage will be wrong at first and you will adjust it twice in the first year, and none of that matters as much as the habit itself.
While we are here: if your entity is a corporation, Georgia’s net worth tax kicks in above one hundred thousand dollars of net worth. Small number, easy to cross, regularly forgotten by companies that formed the entity years ago and never looked at that line again.
3. Pricing off last year’s costs
This one has gotten expensive lately. Insurance, materials, wages, and rent have all moved in the same direction, and I keep finding price lists that were set two or three years ago and quietly carried forward because nobody wanted the conversation with customers.
Here is what that looks like on paper. A contractor I worked with last year was quoting jobs on a labor rate he set in 2022. His techs had gotten two raises since. His gross margin on service calls had drifted from thirty-eight percent down to twenty-six, and because volume was up, total revenue looked fine on the P&L. He was busier than ever and taking home less.
Rebuild your unit economics once a year. One job, one product, one hour of billable time. What does it cost you today, fully loaded, and what are you charging. If the two numbers have drifted apart, they will keep drifting.
4. Owner compensation that isn’t a number
Ask a lot of small business owners in Georgia what they pay themselves and you get a shrug and a range. They take a draw when the account looks healthy and skip it when it doesn’t. It feels responsible. It is actually the fastest way to lose track of whether the business works.
If your own pay floats, you cannot tell the difference between a company that generates a real return and a company that is quietly funded by your unpaid labor. Set the number. Pay it like any other fixed cost. If the business cannot carry it, that is information you needed anyway, and you needed it earlier than you are getting it.
There is a tax dimension to this for S corporations, and your CPA should be in that conversation. My interest is narrower. I want the number to exist.
5. No line between the good month and the good year
Seasonality is not a surprise. Every business I have worked with in this area has a shape to its year, and most owners can describe it accurately if you ask them directly. What they don’t do is plan against it.
So the strong quarter funds a hire, or a truck, or a build-out, because in that moment the cash is real and the confidence is high. Then the slow stretch arrives on schedule and the new fixed cost is still there.
Look at three years of monthly revenue side by side. The pattern will be obvious, probably more obvious than you expect. Then set your commitments against the trough, not the peak. The good months are for building reserves and paying down debt, and that is a boring answer, but the alternative is a very predictable kind of crisis.
What I would do first
If you only take one thing from this, take the thirteen-week cash forecast. It is the cheapest of the five fixes and it exposes the other four faster than any conversation I could have with you.
I run these as a fixed-scope engagement for companies in Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, and Buckhead. Two weeks, your numbers, and a document you can actually use afterward. If that sounds useful, the contact page has my direct line.