Hi {{first name|there}},

Your CFO can produce a report that answers last month's questions.

But you're not running last month.

Cash flow is a forward discipline — and the CEOs who control their financial outcomes are always running two clocks. The operational horizon: next 90, 180, 360 days. And the strategic horizon: next 24, 36, 48, 60 months.

Most CEOs are only watching one. Too many are watching neither.

That's what this issue is about.

Here's what we're covering today:

March 30, 2026 from 1 PM EST / 6 PM GMT

Join me for a Strategic Financial Intelligence Masterclass designed for CFOs and Finance Leaders who want to scale smarter.

I’m partnering with Ramp to bring you this insightful session for finance leaders who are done letting a single metric do work it was never designed to do.

EBITDA shapes valuations, lender conversations, board discussions, and performance reviews. Yet most leaders rely on it without fully understanding what it captures — and what it quietly leaves out.

In this exclusive masterclass, you'll uncover:

You'll walk away with a sharper framework for using EBITDA intelligently — in board conversations, lender negotiations, and internal performance reviews.

Those that join us live and stay until the end wil get my exclusive EBITDA Playbook Checklist - so don’t miss out.

PS. Ramp is giving away 20 Ember To-Go Mugs (14oz - $100 value) to 20 lucky attendees in this session, so come for EBITDA and stay for coffee.

After successfully running The CEO Financial Intelligence 6-week program for several cohorts in 2025, I am finally launching the CEO Financial Intelligence Academy — a structured, three-tier annual membership that takes CEOs from financial literacy to institutional-grade financial intelligence.

If you’re running a $5M–$200M+ company and your investment decisions still feel more like gut feel than discipline — if your strategy and your cash flow aren’t in the same conversation — if your P&L is the only statement your leadership team truly watches — this is what I built for you.

The CEO Financial Intelligence Academy is a complete financial operating system — curriculum, coaching, and community — built on your real company numbers.

Join anytime and get access to the Community and Coaching imediately, and secure your spot in the upcoming cohort to get immersed into our 5*rated Curriculum.

Three Academy Programs — one integrated system:

BUILD — The 6-week live Curriculum + Coaching on your own CEO Dashboard + Community access+ 12-month full access to everything.

LEAD — Everything in BUILD + monthly CEO Financial Dashboard update + monthly group dashboard reviews.

COMMAND — Everything in LEAD + automated real time institutional-grade financial intelligence infrastructure. 18+ Custom Built Power BI dashboards, 60-month rolling forecasts, full suite of analytics and CEO/CFO decision ready intelligence.

Learn more here academy.oanalabes.com and stay tuned for when we officially open enrolment.

Now let’s talk about cash.

These are not trick questions. They are the basic visibility tests that separate CEOs who lead their financial strategy from CEOs who react to it. If you cannot answer them without calling your CFO first, that’s not a delegation success story. It’s a visibility gap that will show up as a constraint at the worst possible time.

1. What is your current cash runway at your current operating burn rate, and what assumptions drive that number?

Not the bank balance. The actual operational runway — factoring in receivables timing, payroll cycles, debt service, and committed capex. This number should live in your head, not your CFO’s spreadsheet.

2. How long does it currently take to convert a sale into collected cash?

This is your Cash Conversion Cycle: days inventory outstanding plus days sales outstanding minus days payable outstanding. If you don’t know this number, you don’t know whether growth is generating cash or consuming it.

3. If your top two customers slowed payment by 30 days, what would that do to your liquidity in the next 90 days?

Customer concentration and receivables risk are often invisible in the P&L. They show up suddenly in the cash flow statement. If you can’t model this scenario in real time, you’re navigating blind.

4. What are your current covenant thresholds, and how much headroom do you have right now?

Not the definitions. The actual numbers, against actual thresholds, with forward projections. Covenant stress doesn’t announce itself. It builds quietly in the gap between what you track and what your lender is watching.

5. How much additional debt capacity do you have under your lender’s actual math — not your internal assumptions?

Banks use fixed charge coverage ratios, leverage definitions, and stress scenarios that differ from how most companies model their own capacity. If you’ve never modeled your debt capacity using your lender’s framework, you don’t know your real limit.

6. When is your next debt maturity, and is your current trajectory on track to refinance at acceptable terms?

Refinancing conversations that start from a position of strength produce better outcomes on every dimension. If you’re waiting until the maturity is within 12 months, you’re negotiating under pressure.

7. Is your current growth plan self-funding, or does it require external capital — and if so, when?

This requires a forward cashflow model, not a P&L projection. And that in turn requires a solid balance sheet, not P&L projections…Revenue growth that outpaces cash generation creates a funding gap that shows up as a surprise to leaders who only track the income statement.

8. What return have you generated on each major capital deployment in the last 12 months?

Not the projected return from the approval memo. The actual return. If you can’t track return on deployed capital after the fact, you’re approving investments you’re never accountable for delivering.

9. If revenue dropped 15% tomorrow, what is your expected financial position in 6 months?

This is one of the many downside scenarios your lenders run on your business. Running it yourself, before they do, is what helps put you in control of the conversation. But it’s just one piece of the puzzle. So if the answer is “I’m not sure,” start fixing that first.

10. What is your business actually worth today, and what has to change operationally to reach your valuation target?

Valuation is not a number you wait for an acquirer to assign. It is a result of specific operational decisions: margin profile, cash conversion, growth quality, and capital efficiency. If your valuation target isn’t reverse-engineered into operating priorities, you’re not managing value — you’re hoping for it.

The problem is rarely intelligence or effort. It’s capability, skillset and infrastructure. Most financial systems are built to produce historical reports, not forward visibility. They capture what happened. They don’t connect what happened to what’s coming.

If your monthly close takes two to three weeks, your cash visibility is always 45 to 60 days behind reality. That lag doesn’t just create inconvenience. It means that by the time you see a cash trend, the constraint has already been building for two months. You’re not managing risk. You’re documenting what already happened.

Most companies have a budget. Far fewer have a rolling forecast that connects actuals to a live forward model. Without that connection, questions 7, 9, and 10 above are answered with guesswork. The CEO asks “what does the next 6 to 24 months look like?” and finance produces a set of assumptions that are already stale.

Covenant tracking is almost always reactive in companies that haven’t built a dedicated system for it. Management tracks EBITDA and net income. The bank is watching coverage ratios and leverage. When the covenant threshold is approached, the CEO is often the last to know — because nobody modeled forward covenant headroom as part of the routine financial review.

The answer to all three of these gaps is the same: a financial intelligence and operating system that connects actuals to a forward model, tracks capital constraints in real time, and produces decision-ready outputs — not reports that require translation.

If you hesitated on more than two of those 10 questions, you don’t have a knowledge problem. You have a dangerous infrastructure problem.

The CEO Financial Intelligence Academy exists to close both gaps simultaneously using our proprietary and proven CEO Finance OS^TM.

You’ll build the decision framework that makes these questions natural — and you’ll install the financial dashboard that makes the answers always available, all inside a community that shares your drive and commitment.

You’ll finally have the operating system a CEO needs to lead capital conversations with authority: cash flow strategy, risk visibility, and capital allocation logic that holds up in real conversations — with boards, lenders, investors, and your own leadership team.

BUILD · LEAD · COMMAND — three programs, one integrated system.

→ Watch the free 60-minute CEO Masterclass and take the free CEO Blind- Spot Diagnostic^TM to get started.

See you next week.

Oana