The Podcast That Has My Attention
They dropped the podcast with the former owner of Plantmade, I have a financial background. I hold my bachelor in financial management and I worked in financial administration, so I had a feel for what happened the moment the story broke.
Before that, something pulled at me. I saw a clip of another young lady breaking down the podcast, and the comments told on people. Someone wrote that she obviously was not doing well, since she said she was bringing in millions of pounds while also being in debt. Let me explain how business works, because that comment shows a gap that keeps a lot of founders stuck.
Sales Does Not Tell the Whole Story
Sales does not give you the full picture. The only thing a sales figure tells you is quantity times price. How much moved out the door. Everybody wants a desirable top line number, and yes, a higher sales volume opens the door to higher profit. That is the door, not the room. A business with millions in sales can still sit deep in the hole, and the currency does not matter. Pounds, dollars, yen, rand, rubles. The number on the invoice is not the money in the bank.
People skip over the parts that eat that revenue alive. Human capital, interest, depreciation, licenses, fees, insurance, taxes, debt servicing, liquidity, and the assets you carry. When you ignore those, you tell on yourself. You reveal that you believe revenue lands straight in your pocket, and it does not.
A Business Is a System
A business is a system. It is not a magic box that prints money. The reason you set one up is to make money, and to make money you build a structure where cash flows in and cash flows out in a way you control. The discipline sits in the management of that flow, not in the headline figure you post for applause. This is the part that separates a founder who survives from a founder who folds.[1]
Mike Michalowicz makes this plain in Profit First, where he shows that treating revenue as success while ignoring what leaves the account is the quiet habit that drains otherwise healthy companies. His point lines up with the lesson here. The Plantmade situation was not a sales problem. The sales were strong, which is exactly why a larger move was on the table. The management of the system is where the trouble lived.
Why Being in the Red Does Not Mean Failure
Look at how many corporations sit in the red and still call it a strong year. They carry debt with a plan to pay it back over five to ten years. They hired heavily, so human capital climbed. They signed contracts, insurance, and fees that weigh on the books. None of that makes them frauds. It makes them businesses running a long game.
Stability takes time, even for the giants. A company can run one or two years in the red before it turns. When the losses run too long and start cutting into profit or the return owed to shareholders, leadership acts. They cut roles, since human capital is often the heaviest expense. They sell off a merger or joint venture that drains cash. They close a department that keeps losing after every attempt to turn it around. They do this to survive, because the business has to make money.
So when this founder says they were deep in the hole while pulling in millions, she did not lie. On sales, she did well. On the management of the cash, the debt, and the system, that is where it slipped.
The Real Reason People Get Scammed
This same gap in understanding is why so many people get scammed. The accounts promising you ten thousand in a day, a week, or a month teach you nothing about setting up a system or running one. They sell a trick. Content creators and influencers who flash income screenshots without structure leave their audience exposed. So I will not entertain the idea that every founder who looked successful was faking it. Strong sales with weak systems is a known pattern, not a lie.
What This Means for Black Women Founders
Many founders, and a heavy share of Black founders and Black women founders, build startups that need outside capital to grow, to meet demand, to manage debt, and to hold enough liquidity. They need investors. We have watched promising companies close because the money never came in, because people would not buy and would not invest. That is the harder truth sitting under stories like Hanifa, where the audience claims she failed to deliver what she promised. Building a startup is heavy work. It is not brushing your teeth and walking away.[2]
The data backs this. Research on why companies fold points to running out of cash and weak financial control as a leading cause, far more than weak demand alone.[3] That is the alarm. A founder posts five million in sales, and the celebration is fair, yet the question that matters is whether the system behind it holds long enough to turn that figure into profit. In the Plantmade case, the cash on hand was not enough to cover the debt costs, and proper debt management was missing. When you add investors holding back from Black women building real companies, the picture turns from a personal failure into a structural one.
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Footnotes
[1] Mike Michalowicz, Profit First, Portfolio, 2017. This book supports the article by showing that founders who treat top line revenue as a sign of health, while ignoring expenses and cash control, end up draining profitable looking companies, which mirrors the Plantmade breakdown. https://mikemichalowicz.com/profit-first/
[2] Tom Eisenmann, Why Start-ups Fail, Harvard Business Review, May to June 2021. This piece supports the section on founders by showing that strong demand and visible growth do not protect a company when the underlying financial structure and resources are weak. https://hbr.org/2021/05/why-start-ups-fail
[3] CB Insights, The Top 12 Reasons Startups Fail, August 2021. This report supports the closing argument by ranking running out of cash and funding gaps among the leading causes of business closure, which underlines the point that liquidity and debt management decide survival. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/startup-failure-reasons-top/
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