What 200K in Frozen Cash Taught One Founder About Running a Business

Krzysiek Romaniak runs two companies. One is Flowmore, a B2B agency that builds outbound sales engines for clients. The other is Energetyczny Projekt, a B2C business modernizing and building homes across Poland.

Both businesses, in their early years, ran into the same problem — and it nearly broke each of them.

By the time he caught it, Krzysiek had roughly 200,000 PLN of frozen capital sitting in unpaid invoices across his books. Some clients were just slow. Some clients had genuine cash flow issues. And some — the ones he never recovered from — had filed for bankruptcy before he ever made the first follow-up call.

In a recent webinar, Krzysiek walked through the lessons that cost him roughly the equivalent of a small apartment to learn. They're worth absorbing before you pay the same tuition.

Lesson 1: "We did the work, they'll pay" is a myth founders tell themselves

The earliest mistake is also the most psychologically comfortable: a belief that doing good work entitles you to get paid for it.

It does, legally. It doesn't, operationally.

Krzysiek admits that for the first couple of years, he assumed clients who'd received high-quality deliverables would pay on time because that's what reasonable people do. When invoices slipped past due, he assumed it was a one-off oversight. He'd "deal with it next week."

Next week became next month. Next month became next quarter. And eventually a chunk of those invoices became permanently uncollectable because the underlying clients had gone under.

The lesson: doing great work and getting paid for it are two completely separate operational disciplines. One doesn't automatically produce the other. You build both, deliberately.

Lesson 2: There's always something more important than collections (and that's the problem)

Every founder running a sub-50-person business knows this feeling: the calendar is jammed with sales calls, product reviews, hiring, customer escalations, and strategic meetings. Following up on overdue invoices is somewhere on the list, but it never reaches the top.

This isn't laziness. It's rational economics. A sales call has a clear, exciting upside. Following up on a 30-day overdue invoice has a vague, awkward downside. Of course the founder picks the sales call.

The problem is that this rational decision, repeated weekly for two years, compounds into the 200K problem. Each individual deferral is justifiable. The cumulative effect is catastrophic.

The lesson: anything that depends on the founder's manual attention will lose to higher-priority tasks every time. If you want collections to actually happen, it cannot live on the founder's to-do list. It has to live in a system that runs without you.

Lesson 3: Manual collection is a job nobody wants

When Krzysiek did finally try to fix the problem, he hired admin staff to handle the calls. That worked, briefly. Then he discovered something he hadn't anticipated: nobody on his team enjoyed making collection calls. Turnover on that role was high. People did the bare minimum.

This isn't a Krzysiek-specific problem. It's universal. Calling a client to ask for money is one of the most psychologically taxing tasks in business. It mixes social discomfort, fear of confrontation, anxiety about the relationship, and the pressure of being held responsible for the outcome. Even in dedicated finance teams, it tends to be the job people delay or delegate first.

The lesson: even when you delegate manual collections, you're delegating a task humans actively resist. Output will always be lower than you'd predict on paper.

Lesson 4: The costs show up everywhere except the P&L line you're watching

Krzysiek estimates that, at peak chaos in Energetyczny Projekt, the company was spending between 5,000 and 10,000 PLN per month on lawyers and administrative time related to overdue invoices.

That's the visible cost. The invisible costs were larger:

• Cash flow constraints that prevented him from taking opportunities
• Stress and time tax on his own role as CEO
• Team morale dropping every time payroll got tight
• Lost trust with vendors when his own payments slipped

Founders track gross profit. Founders track new revenue. Few founders explicitly track "cost of cash flow chaos." But it shows up — in burnout, in delayed strategic moves, in pressure to take suboptimal financing.

The lesson: the financial cost of broken collections is the smallest part of the actual damage. The strategic cost is bigger. The personal cost is bigger still.

Lesson 5: The fix is cheaper than you think

When Krzysiek finally went looking for solutions, he assumed automation meant a 25,000 PLN ERP module from a vendor like Enova, requiring a quarter of internal IT effort and disrupting how everyone worked.

What he actually found was a SaaS tool that took a few days to set up, charged per invoice processed, and started cutting overdue receivables almost immediately.

"I was afraid this would be a three-month project costing tens of thousands. We did it in a few days."

The lesson: founders consistently overestimate the cost and complexity of fixing systemic problems. The reason most companies don't solve collection chaos isn't budget. It's outdated mental models about what implementation looks like.

What 200K bought

Krzysiek's lessons cost him roughly 200,000 PLN. Yours don't have to.

Three things, in order:

1. Stop assuming "we did the work, they'll pay" will produce reliable cash flow. It won't.
2. Stop putting collections on your personal to-do list. It will lose every priority battle.
3. Stop assuming the fix is expensive and slow. Modern automation is days, not quarters; subscriptions, not capital expenditures.

The founders who learn this fast keep their working capital. The founders who learn it slow finance someone else's bankruptcy proceedings.

Decide which one you want to be.