The words of the real economy

The terms that come up at the table, explained without jargon and without fluff. A living glossary: it grows with every episode.

A · Sole trader: The smallest unit of the real economy: one person answering with their own name and their own assets. Half the guests at this table started here.
B · Break-even: The day the business stops eating your savings because revenue covers every cost. Nobody posts about it, and it is one of the biggest wins there is.
C · Cash: The only thing that closes companies. You do not go under for lack of profit, you go under for lack of cash. It comes up in one of every three conversations here.
C · Scar: The entry requirement at this table: a mistake of your own you can name, date and explain. No scar, no conversation, just advertising.
C · CAC (customer acquisition cost): What it truly costs to win one customer, counting ads, time and commissions. If you do not know it, you do not know whether your business works.
C · Churn: The share of customers who leave each month. The most honest metric there is: it measures whether your product is worth a second time.
D · Due diligence: The examination a company goes through before somebody buys it or invests. Where every piece of paperwork that was not in order finally surfaces.
E · EBITDA: Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. Useful for comparing companies, dangerous when used to hide that there is no cash.
F · Working capital: The cushion between a bad quarter and shutting down. The guests with the most years behind them all carry a sacred number in their head.
F · Cash flow: Money actually coming in and going out, with dates attached. A company profitable on paper can die if it gets paid in ninety days and pays in thirty.
G · Management: The boring part that decides whether the rest exists. Almost no guest arrived here because they knew how to manage, and almost all survived by learning it.
I · Unqualified practice: Practising a profession without the training or licence it requires. A theme in nearly every regulated trade that passes through this table.
K · KPI: The handful of numbers that actually tell you how the business is doing. If you have twenty, you have none.
M · Margin: What is actually left after everything. The number the gurus never mention when they talk about revenue.
M · Late payment: Being owed money for work already delivered. The silent cause of half the small business closures in Spain.
N · Payroll: The heaviest responsibility at this table: the 28th is not a metric, it is your team’s families. Signing it without knowing you can cover it comes up again and again.
O · Cold outreach: Writing to people who do not know you. That is how this podcast got its first guests: one by one, no shortcuts, with a very low reply rate.
P · SME: The backbone of any economy: over 99% of all companies. The protagonist of this table and the great absentee from the media.
P · Pivot: Changing course in time. The difference between pivoting and quitting is that in the first case you take the learning with you.
R · Runway: How many months the business has left on current cash. The number that really decides how much risk you can take.
S · Sustaining: The word of the house. Starting up is the part that makes the films; sustaining is the part nobody tells. And it is the hardest thing there is.
S · Survivorship bias: Learning only from the winners. The reason half the business advice in circulation is useless.
T · Business transfer: Selling or handing over a going concern. Sometimes it is the most dignified, best-planned exit there is. Do not let anyone tell you it is quitting.
T · Average order value: What an average customer spends. Raising it 10% is usually easier and more profitable than winning 10% more customers.
V · Added value: What you add beyond raw materials and hours. Without it you can only compete on price, and somebody else always wins that race.