Zephyr Perspective

There's a curious phenomenon in the small business world: the owner who can recite last quarter's revenue figures to the penny yet cannot explain why their star employee just spent three hours creating an invoice that should have taken fifteen minutes. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. Most small business owners are rather like conductors of orchestras where half the musicians are playing from different sheets of music, while the other half are convinced they're in a jazz ensemble.

Author's Note: Similar to my previous strategy article re-write, here is a revisit of my original article  Mastering Cash Flow as part of my periodic review, to revise an original set of foundational articles to be less boring and more readable, while preserving the original as a reference book, dry as it may be. Here's a delicious irony: you can have a thriving business on paper and still find yourself staring at an empty bank account like a tourist who's just discovered their wallet's been pickpocketed. Welcome to the peculiar world of cash flow management, where profitability and liquidity exist in parallel universes, occasionally waving at each other through the window but rarely meeting for tea.

Well, it seems that ‘geopolitical risk’ has finally graduated from the Davos panel discussions to the family office balance sheet. For years, it was a concept debated with academic detachment, a recurring theme for after-dinner speakers. Now, it is a tangible force with a measurable impact on performance, a primary driver of sleepless nights for principals and CIOs alike. The era of assuming a stable, ever-integrating global order (the supposed bedrock of investment strategy for the past few decades) might be over. In its place is a fragmented, multipolar world where trade disputes, regional conflicts, and abrupt policy shocks are not black swan events, but recurring features of the landscape.

There is a peculiar habit of discussing the weather not because we expect to change it, but as a sort of shared, stoic acknowledgement of a force beyond our control. For the last few years, inflation has become the new weather. It is discussed at dinner parties, lamented on news broadcasts, and tracked with meteorological fervor by central bankers. Yet, for families with a perpetual time horizon, treating inflation as a passing storm is a profound, if common, mistake. It is not the weather; it is the climate. And unlike the weather, one can, and indeed must, build structures designed to withstand it.

There was a time, not so long ago, when a well-diversified public market portfolio was the very definition of prudent wealth management. It was elegant, liquid, and, for the most part, effective. That time has passed. Attempting to navigate today’s markets with that playbook alone is akin to bringing a beautifully crafted sailboat to a Formula 1 race: sure, you may look distinguished and admired for the craftsmanship and engineering, but you will not even make it to the tracks.