When trading stops without warning, the instinct is to act decisively. The more useful instinct is to establish the facts first, because the decisions available in week one are wider than those available in week six, and spending them early is how a survivable situation becomes a terminal one.
Establish the runway, honestly
Before anything else: how much cash is on hand, what is genuinely committed to leave, and what is genuinely due to arrive. Not the budget — the bank.
Build it weekly, not monthly, and treat receivables with scepticism. Customers under the same pressure will pay late, and the ones who owe you most are often the ones who go quietest.
The output is a single number: the week the cash runs out if nothing changes. Everything else is decided against that date.
Triage payments deliberately
Not all obligations are equal. Payroll, the suppliers you cannot operate without, and anything carrying personal liability rank differently from a discretionary subscription.
Talk to landlords, lenders and large suppliers early and with a proposal, not a request. A creditor approached in week two with a specific plan is a different conversation from the same creditor chased in week eight after silence.
Make reversible moves first
Deferrals, reduced hours, paused projects and postponed capital spending can be undone. Redundancies, terminated leases and closed lines largely cannot, and they carry legal process and cost of their own.
Exhaust the reversible options before the irreversible ones, unless the runway makes that impossible — which the weekly forecast, not the mood, should tell you.
Keep a record of why
Decisions taken now under pressure will be reviewed later — by a bank, an auditor, a shareholder, possibly a court. Write down what you knew and what you decided, at the time. It costs minutes and is worth a great deal afterwards.