Where the Hell Is All My Money Going?
You keep doing the math, and it keeps not mathing. Your money is gone before you see it. None of this makes sense.
You can't fix what you don't see or understand.
A 60-minute workshop to help you see, understand, and navigate the path to scale.
Twenty years inside the financial operations of growing businesses. Built Aligned Impact to help CPG founders find their path to scale.
A short note on what to expect inside the workshop, why I built it for CPG founders in this range, and a little about how I work.
Revenue is up, and you have never been more stressed.
You built something from almost nothing. You turned a thing you cared about into a business people pay you for. At the beginning you knew every customer's name. Now you are in big grocery, and you are running on fumes.
- Your P&L tells you one thing about your margins and your bank account tells you another.
- Your bookkeeper and CPA tell you what happened. They cannot tell you what happened with the precision you need, or what to do about it.
- You are afraid to say yes to opportunities because you cannot afford to be wrong again, and you are afraid to say no because you cannot afford to be left behind.
- You have leveled up by every external metric you can name, and you have never been more stressed about cash.
These are not personal failings. They are the default operating posture of bootstrapped CPG founders in your range.
- 01 "I should be able to figure this out myself."
- 02 "Revenue growth will fix the cash problem eventually."
- 03 "Visibility is a luxury. I will get to it when I am bigger."
- 04 "Caring about the mission means absorbing the personal cost. That is just what it takes." This one is not a financial belief. It is an identity belief, and the workshop addresses it directly.
- 05 "Growth is happening to me, and I am just trying not to get crushed by it."
Something is missing.
This is the Missing Rung.
Why are you still struggling after so many years of hard work? Most CPG founders I've met don't know.
Here is what I have come to understand:
You've already got the information you need. Within your business is the exact data you need to understand why you are struggling, and how to find your way through.
You likely have a Missing Rung in the structure of your business. There is one function in your business that is likely missing. It's the one that can help you track and understand what is actually happening across your entire business, across sales, marketing, operations, and finance, and translate that into the structure and strategy that finally makes your business as profitable and smooth as you hoped it would be when you started.
Almost no founder at your stage has ever had this function filled well, and the absence is not your fault.
Until it is filled, four things keep happening on repeat.
The Missing Rung is the function almost no founder in your range has ever had filled well.
Whether you fill this function yourself, hire it, or build toward it over time, it needs to be filled.
The challenges with cash, margin, complexity, and risk that you experience are not 4 separate problems. They are 4 different expressions of one structural absence: the missing rung.
Your margins make no sense.
"I thought we were profitable. The P&L said 48 percent margin, and I am always stressed about cash."
Your cash keeps vanishing.
"Revenue is up, cash is down, and I am checking my bank balance every morning with a pit in my stomach."
You keep burning out.
"I am happy we are growing, and it is the thing that is burning me out."
You are one uh-oh away from an emergency.
"I have one distributor doing most of my volume, and I do not yet have a contract with my co-packer."
In short, without this function filled, you lack the structure and strategy you need to get to the next level. And this is what it costs you.
Whether you fill this function yourself, hire it, or build toward it over time, you need someone filling it. The founders who finally break through are the ones who stop trying to do this work alone.
In 60 minutes, you will leave with a way to see your business no bookkeeper or CPA has ever shown you, and one move to make first.
01.
Why your financials show one picture while your business shows another.
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True margin versus gross margin, what trade spend is actually doing to your numbers, and the channel contribution data most CPG founders never see.
02.
The four pains CPG founders carry, and the single structural cause behind all of them.
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Profit Mirage, Cash Paradox, Complexity Crunch, and Risk Exposure are not four separate problems. They are four expressions of one structural absence, and once you can see it, you can fix it.
03.
What it actually takes to fill the Missing Rung well.
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There are four dimensions to the strategic finance function, and the combination of them is rare. You will leave knowing exactly what to look for, whether you fill it yourself, hire it, or build toward it over time.
04.
The five things most CPG founders believe that keep them stuck. The workshop names all five, and the one structural move that makes them irrelevant.
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Most founders have never had anyone name these reasons clearly. The workshop does. And it covers the one structural move that makes all five irrelevant.
What you cannot see is scarier than what you can.Once you can see and understand your data, your fear transforms into information, and information is something you can act on with confidence.
You want to run your business from clarity, not fear.
When this function gets filled, here is what founders who have done it usually say.
- Their mornings change. They open the laptop with a plan instead of a pit in their stomach.
- Their sleep changes. They put the business down at the end of the day and pick it back up in the morning.
- Their decisions change. They say yes or no to the next retail door, the next hire, the next production run from a position of confidence.
- The bigger thing changes. They prove that a values-driven business can be financially sustainable on its own terms, and that purpose and profit are not in conflict.
Your nervous system is holding what your business systems are not.
When you are in the business, every big decision lands heavier than it should. Whether it is the pricing call, the next retail door, the next hire, or the next production run, you triple-check and you delay and you carry the weight of what you cannot see.
What they said after.
When Siri joined our team, we faced several obstacles including the need to transition our accounting system, clean up our QuickBooks, address cash flow challenges, and gain a clearer understanding of our Cost of Goods Sold. His holistic approach, which combines a strategic understanding of business with a strong accounting background, enabled us to overcome these challenges effectively. Our financial health has greatly improved. We now have a better ability to track and improve our COGS, and we experience more peace of mind and confidence in our financial decisions.
The idea of both the financial storytelling and also the systems architecture is a really interesting twist, a different value. Obviously they're all overlapped and interconnected, but it does feel unique. Bringing in the AI idea there, too.
Running a business without clean data felt like trying to steer through fog. We were constantly reacting, unsure if we were making the right calls. Working with Aligned Impact has given us a foundation of clarity and confidence. We finally have visibility into our numbers, we're making informed decisions, and we feel genuinely supported by a team that's both deeply skilled and incredibly human.
Built for the founder who refuses to choose between purpose and profit.
I'm Siri Amrit Khalsa, CMA, and I have spent the last twenty years inside the financial operations of growing businesses. I took my family's commercial landscaping business from $8M to $18M in four years as CFO, and brokered a 7.5x EBITDA exit when the market rate was 5x.
At sixteen, working in my father's business, I found $100,000 in hidden profit by comparing estimated versus actual hours across roughly a hundred maintenance contracts in Excel. Same data the bookkeeper had, different question asked of it. That moment shaped how I read businesses, and it is how I will read yours inside this workshop.
My whole career, going back thirty years one way or another, I have watched founders walk into different versions of the same problem. The ones I have sat across from did not get out by working harder, and they did not get out alone. They got out by filling the function. I built Aligned Impact to help small, conscious founders find their way to scale without losing what made them worth building in the first place.
Three small things to bring with you.
None are required. All of them will make the workshop hit deeper. It is perfectly normal to feel stuck in this stage of business, and the purpose of this workshop is to help you find your way through.
Sit with where the worry lives.
There is a black box in your business right now. The area you have the least visibility into, the corner you avoid even when you know you should look. You do not have to share it, but bring that awareness with you. That is your starting line.
Block the full 60 minutes.
This is interactive and live. Come fully present with your notebook open and other tabs closed. The teaching moves through a specific arc, and the moments that land hardest tend to land in the second half.
Come as you are.
You do not need to have your financials sorted before you arrive, you do not need to know what your contribution margin is, and you do not need to have read anything in advance. Feeling stuck is the starting condition, and that is the point.
Sixty minutes, free, and the door is open.
If anything on this page felt like it was written about you, that is not a coincidence. It is what I hear from CPG founders in this range, and it is the reason I built this workshop.