How to find and capture cash flow opportunities in 90 minutes

Executive overview

Most businesses leave significant cash on the table because leaders don't have a clear view of which levers actually move profitability. The cash flow drivers framework breaks the income statement into five numbers and identifies the specific actions that improve each one.

The game is simple: grow gross profit faster than operating expense. A 90-minute leadership exercise can surface millions in real opportunity — and assign accountability to capture it.

One gross margin point captured beats months of unfocused cost-cutting.

The five-number income statement

• Revenue: all dollars generated from products and services
• Directly variable costs: costs incurred to deliver each unit of revenue
• Gross profit: dollars remaining after direct costs
• OPEX: fixed expenses required to operate the business
• Net profit: what's left after OPEX

Revenue levers

• Increase customer count via new markets, locations, or re-engaging lapsed buyers
• Grow units per customer — target customers who split their spend with competitors
• Avoid discounts: each discount requires disproportionately more sales to recover the same gross profit
• Raise prices only alongside genuine increases in value

Direct cost levers

• Reduce waste, rework, and redundancy in delivery
• Audit unit-level consumption (e.g. over-portioning, energy lost to rework)
• Ask: are we as efficient and effective as possible per unit delivered?

Operating expense levers

• Drive efficiency: do necessary things faster and better
• Drive effectiveness: stop doing the wrong things entirely
• Use delegate-to-elevate to keep people in their highest-value work
• Apply technology where it removes effort rather than adds complexity

Running the cash flow drivers exercise

• Map the biggest improvement areas to the five-number formula
• Estimate the dollar impact for each lever
• Assign a single owner (who) to each item
• Convert each item into a rock — a 90-day priority
• Review progress at 90 and 180 days inside the regular weekly meeting rhythm

Real-world result

• An $80M manufacturer ran the exercise in 90 minutes
• Identified $4M in opportunity; set a conservative $2M target
• After 90 days: 40% of the target ($800K) already realised
• Net impact: $400K in real bottom-line gain from a single session

Cadence

• Run the exercise at minimum once per year
• The business changes; new opportunities emerge that weren't visible before
• Repeat sessions consistently surface items missed in prior years