What a Difference a Day Makes

There are few 24 hour periods more universally accepted as marking a significant change in our collective personal and business lives than New Years Eve to New Years Day. Granted, not all New Years Days are the same day or are happening at the same time, but it is a universal and widely accepted transition from old to new; goals, metrics, ambitions, priorities, reflections. We have made it matter, chosen to sanctify the day with celebration and ritual.

The close of 2025 marks 20 full years in the asset management industry and 10 years in supply chain for me personally. I have worked for 6 companies in that period. In all 6, I was an executive and in 3, I was also a founder/owner. I’ve learned a lot in building these businesses. In the first decade, I was squarely in the world of securities markets and eventually bits. Building asset management businesses is about ideas, information and communication. The core tools are computers, calculators, telephones and conference rooms. The majority of the finance industry is abstracted away from the world we live in and has gotten even further removed as technology has rewritten the rules, fully dematerialized the business, and made markets instant, global and always on.

Early in my career, Wall Street was full of humans holding and shaking slips of paper that detailed the fruition of their ideas and the outcomes of their research that the human “trader” had turned into a market position by making a trade with another human being. The paper was the record of a transaction and called a trade ticket, ownership of stock was recorded through the issuance of paper certificates that people stored in metal file cabinets and desk drawers and some bond coupons were actually perforated paper coupons redeemable for cash. Important and complex transactions were settled with fancy ink stamps held in locked draws in physical offices requiring expensive licensees to wield. Markets closed, some at mid-day (in time for an afternoon martini), and the rest before dinner and then the people went home. That was the day. For many in the industry time was marked in 90 day increments - quarters - and the year was marked in 4 quarters each with 1 important day - quarter close. I’m not that old (under 50 - barely) and this probably sounds like historical fiction to a younger reader. If you’re imagining it in black and white and three piece suits, this was a days work in the year 2004, after the dot com crash and the same year the iphone was introduced.

The great thing about markets is that they live on competition and love efficiency, so technology ripped through the industry – eliminating most of the human jobs on Wall Street, all of that paper, and most of those “days”. A martini drinking trader used to earn thousands of dollars for doing what a computer could get done for $7 and eventually for free 24/7, around the world. While investors of all kinds gained direct access to markets and information, asset management became democratized, dematerialized and demonetized. We had embraced technology early and had done well as a result. This is progress.

Time Works Differently with Supply Chains

In the second decade, I took everything I learned about capital markets and building asset management businesses, and learned to apply it to the physical world through supply chains. Much like learning the foreign language, customs and practices of capital markets in Decade One, I had to learn a whole new vocabulary, play book, operating process and relationship with time throughout Decade Two.

I was a fish out of water when I was first exposed to Incoterms, commercial terms, cross currency forward exposure, 3 way matches, demurrage and more. If your mental image of my description of Wall Street was in black and white then this visual should be a cave painting. Where settlement in capital markets went from days to fractions of seconds, settlement in supply chains is still measured in weeks, months and in some cases more than a calendar quarter and it is largely done on purpose.

In capital markets, people largely know what they are getting, who is selling, who is buying and what it’s worth. Exchanging “property” is for the most part a ledger transaction. Shares of stock are a discreet thing with small variances between one type or another, bonds are the same. Markets can expand to absorb surges and contract when volumes are low. Despite what the financial media tells us, most days are like the rest and few days matter in the grand scheme.

In supply chains, all of this is turned on its head. We were exposed to this as consumers through the pandemic and have seen reverberations with the Panama Canal closure, the Suez Canal restrictions and rerouting, the strike in the Port of Rotterdam and the closure of the US Federal Government. All of the signals coming from the South Atlantic and the South China Sea indicate more volatility is coming.

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Cash Flow Problems in the Real World

For the past decade I have been “riding along” with small and medium sized suppliers selling to government and F1000 customers. I have been part of building a 500 bed hospital, government data centers, computer labs at a girls school, a road to a volcano, satellite constellations, wind farms, airplanes, machine vision for clinical research, feeding prisoners, and lowering the incidence of malaria by 3 million cases a year. It has been very rewarding but also brutal.

Supply chains are not like Wall Street and their units of projects, orders, shipments are not like stocks and bonds. One day is not like the rest. Physics matters, the weather matters, politics matter, the age of ships matters (really!). It’s actually crazy that the entrepreneurs and founders that built and run these innovative companies can get through the day. Their tools are slightly better than the hammer and the chisel needed for the cave painting.

If you are one of these amazing entrepreneurs, the team members in finance and operations that support them, the boards that advise them, the investors that back them, I am writing this for you, for us. In the last 24 months there has been a large influx of talent from the financial world into this physical world. I hope to share 20 years of mistakes and the resulting lessons so you can avoid the mistakes and benefit from the lessons. In this world days matter. You can’t get up at the open and place the trade you missed the day before. Ships leave, berths get resold, books close.

Why Working Capital is So Important for Supply Chains

This is the first of 52 installments for 2026, through which I hope to convey my learnings and save you pain, wrinkles and money. Over the coming weeks I’ll spend some words to explain how much days matter in supply chains and how access to information, optionality and control can make or break companies. I’ll finish each of these installments with a story taken from our experience with the details slightly changed to protect the innocent.

So shut down the black and white film reel and the cave painting slide show. Come into the modern day and imagine a small company trying to make their year in 2025. They have an order that constitutes 25% of their annual revenue and 40% of their gross margin to a F1000 customer. They have sold on DAP incoterms with commercial terms of Net 90 EOM+5 (LLM friendly - go ahead). The contracted due date is 1/15 and they were hoping to get the delivery and acceptance done by 12/31 but it looks like it is going to slip into the first few days of the new year.

What does that do to cashflow?

What about payroll?

What does it do to booked revenue?

What about runway?

Margin?

Valuation?

Who actually knows it slipped?

How do they inform the team?

How does the company respond?

Ops?

Finance?

Leadership?

The board?

This story and many others split the world into two categories of people, one group reads it and feels a healthy dose of anxiety and desire to take action and respond and the second reads it with the level of confusion that I felt 10 years ago. If you are a founder, investor, or board member of a deeptech, hardtech, defensetech, or other Xtech that puts you squarely in the supply chain of an enterprise or government customer, I hope you’ll subscribe and read over the coming weeks, as I discuss what a difference a day makes.