Advice to the CEO for BEFORE you run into financial trouble

Do not let your employees accumulate alot of annual leave. This is a financial liability which becomes a real problem if you do run into trouble. If humanly possible, do the right thing and pay all your suppliers fully. I have no respect for people who run their company off the backs of their suppliers. Make sure your company is always paying its full entitlements to employees and always up to the minute on these payments - this is not the right area to start scraping up cash when it is tight. If you don't have the money to pay entitlements then you're better to go bust than stop paying them. I've never had investors but presumably it is very much in your interest to keep them up to the day informed about the cash position and ask them and involve them in the process - they will be justafiably angry if this is a surprise to them, they may have solutions if you get them involved, and they have some level of ownership when the bell finally tolls if they have been well informed constantly as the plane drops from the sky. Don't break the law, ever - your reputation is the only thing you have. Always know every day how much debt you would be in if the company folded today. If debt > $0 then sink the ship immediately. Folding a company with debt will ruin you personally for years to come, perhaps forever. Folding a company without debt lets you get straight on with life. If the writing is on the wall then think very seriously about folding the company whilst there is money to pay out all suppliers and employers. Every day of operation for a company destined to fail is simply less cash to pay out suppliers and employees. Being bankrupted is an INFINITELY different thing to shutting a company down cleanly. Your company is not out of business when it has $0 cash, it is out of business when its liabilities cannot be met by the cash you have. Don't make the mistake of running it down where you don't have enough cash to pay all liabilities.