09 Jul 2026 · Journal
Working-capital triage in the first fortnight
Turnaround theatre loves a 100-day plan. Cash does not. If a Taichung manufacturer is already stretching suppliers, you have about ten working days to decide what is real inventory and what is hope on a pallet.
Day one to three: walk the warehouse with the person who actually picks orders, not the person who presents KPI slides. Count the slow movers. Ask which SKUs exist because a related distributor “might need them.” Write the answer down in the cash view as a haircut, not as a strategy debate.
Day four to seven: age the receivables with names. Related parties get a different colour. Export letters of credit that have been “about to come in” for six weeks get a date or they get a zero. This is the same discipline as module two of the reconstruction studio, compressed because a plant cannot wait for a full cohort.
Day eight to ten: look at the cash pool. Many Taiwan groups still run one pot with several legal names. If a carve-out or a restated facility is coming, the pot is a trap. We describe how to paper a split on the carve-out sequencing page; the fortnight version is simply: stop netting quietly, start recording who is borrowing from whom.
We do not promise that suppliers will wait. We do promise that a treasurer who arrives at a lender meeting with a marked 13-week view will waste less of everyone’s time than one who arrives with a brand story. If you need that view taught rather than staffed, the programs list includes a plant-gate format.