Cash management on Shark Tank

I love Shark Tank. Many entrepreneurs I know do too.

In a recent episode, Susty Party pitched their environmentally friendly paper tableware company (segment starts at 30:00). There were quite a few red flags.  They didn’t get a deal and Mark Cuban hit it right on the head (starting at 35:34) “It’s not about how much you’ve raised, it’s not about your sales, it’s how effectively you’ve managed your cash”  YES!!! There were enough signs that they had not managed their cash effectively and unfortunately these women were not able to get a deal.

So what could they have done differently?  Certainly managing their inventory was a big issue, but from the perspective of cash management, they needed to be conserving this very important asset.  At the time of the showing they had only $30,000 left in the bank and were adding a bunch of new products.  Did they know if they could afford to do that?  Did they know how much runway they had left?  I’m not so sure.

Maybe if they had GrowthCast things would have turned out differently.

Shark Tank Episode

https://youtu.be/IIT4SlRgGJ0?t=1798