Essays

A case study. Many traditional freight forwarders still run on manual steps, and it costs them time, money and customers. How the first bottleneck was found, and how payment approvals went online as the first step in going digital.

The whole series in one practical close. Seven measures that make the funding gap visible, none of which appear on a profit and loss account, and the single afternoon exercise that changes the conversation with a managing director.

Stop trying to buy payment terms from hauliers, because you are asking the weaker balance sheet to carry the stronger one. What a haulier is really optimising, why readiness buys more loyalty than rate, and why a haulage quote should be priced against the demurrage meter rather than against the other quote.

Most cash flow advice is written for a company that can walk away. This is the version for one that cannot: why a very large buyer is a duration problem rather than a credit risk, the blanket purchase order, claiming reimbursables early, and borrowing against their name instead of yours.

Overtrading is the failure that only happens to companies doing well. Your profit grows with your margin, your cash need grows with your volume, and the volume number is thirty times larger. The four stages of the slide, in the order they arrive.

You do not have one payment term, you have five, they belong to five different people, and only one of them is written anywhere in your paperwork. Why the gap between them was never designed by anybody, and which of the five will actually move.

A forwarder can have its best year ever and still fail to make payroll, and nothing has to go wrong for it to happen. The two kinds of money on every freight invoice, why you front about thirty naira for every one you earn, and why the gap belongs to no department.

Most container shipments in the world are sold on FOB, and almost none of them should be. The four sea-only trade terms, when each is genuinely right, and the container mistake that leaves a three-day gap nobody has agreed on.

Four of the eleven trade terms cannot legally apply to an air shipment, and people use them every day. Which seven actually work for air, what each one means at an airport, and the traps that belong to air alone.

A trader budgeted eighteen thousand dollars for a shipment quoted “CIF Lagos”. He was wrong by about half, and he was not careless. Incoterms explained in plain words, with the seven mistakes that cost people the most.