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A customer came to Treyd this week with a problem. And not the kind you can leave sitting in someone's inbox. They had suppliers in the Netherlands waiting to be paid. Goods needed to move. Orders needed placing. 🚚📦 Meanwhile, they'd spent four months going through paperwork and back-and-forth with HSBC trying to get an overdraft facility in place. Four months. 🫠 The message to us was basically: "I need to pay my suppliers. Pronto." So we got to work. 48 hours later, Treyd had approved a £200,000 supplier payment facility. ⚡ The first payment? 💷 £100,000 straight to the suppliers. Goods are already on the road. 🚛 And strangely enough, I had another conversation this week with a business owner who told me they couldn't even get a funding conversation going with HSBC because they weren't doing £5m+ in sales. There are a lot of good businesses between "small" and £5m. They still have suppliers to pay. They still need stock. They still have opportunities that won't wait four months for someone to finish the paperwork. That's exactly why Treyd exists. We pay your suppliers upfront and give you up to 120 days to pay us back. Sometimes you don't need another four-month process. You need someone to look at the business, make a decision and help you get the goods moving. 🤝 If you're feeling a little neglected by the traditional guys, let's talk. 👋

Founders and CFOs, your business needs £10k today to fund inventory. Would you take it knowing you’ll repay £14k? Yearly reminder of a merchant I spoke to, a small business doing around £200k turnover, who needed to make the final payment on a order of jars for their candles (ready for Q4/65% of their annual sales) They had a short term working capital problem, around 120 days, but went to market looking at 12 month loans to solve it... They nearly pulled the trigger on this beauty: £10k borrowed 5.7% per 30 days £1,181 minimum monthly repayment £4,179 total interest £14,179 total repayment 41.8% total cost over 12 months Effective annual rate roughly 97% That last number is extremely high as they would be paying the loan down every month, so you don’t have the full £10k for the whole year They were essentially looking at a 12-month solution for a four month cash flow problem, with fees so high they wouldn’t have any margin left (fact checked against their P&L) Sometimes getting the cash today unlocks enough margin or growth to justify expensive funding. There are plenty of different types of lending for a reason. This lender has 9479 great reviews though (now 13080!!!!) must be doing something right. Hugely profitable as well 👀

BrainGain paid for 100% of their inventory before it was even on the water. 50% to start manufacturing. 50% before the stock left China. Kareem and the team spent a couple of years gradually negotiating better terms with suppliers — while making sure they never paid late. Today, they pay just 10% upfront, with the remaining 90% paid after they’ve sold the stock. That’s a significant change to the cash conversion cycle The result is that BrainGain can keep its cash in the business for longer and turn that money more times over the course of a year. In the latest Treyd Secrets, Kareem Raslan and I dig into this and plenty more from the less glamorous operational side of scaling a product business: working capital, unit economics, inventory and the cash conversion cycle. If you’re scaling a product business, don’t skip this one. Big thanks Kareem for coming on the show. Episode in comments.

A big reorder from your largest retailer is exactly the kind of news you want as a founder. Until you realize you need to fund it. You need to commit to large amounts of stock now. The retailer might not pay you for another 60 or 90 days. The bigger the order, the more working capital you need to fulfill it. It’s one of the contradictions of growing a product business: some of your best opportunities can put the most pressure on cash flow. It’s also exactly why we built Treyd. We give growing product businesses access to working capital to pay suppliers, fulfill bigger orders and keep growth moving — without waiting for customer payments to catch up.

If a founder is going to send me a LinkedIn message looking for supplier funding, it’s 100% gonna be on a Sunday morning 🤣 They just don’t have an off switch Most of the time they’ve woken up, checked overnight sales, scanned their emails, and then their mind is racing a million miles per hour thinking about how they’re going to deliver on their target for the year. Making sure you have enough inventory on hand for a period that brings in most of your revenue is going to make or break your year You won’t always get the interaction levels you want on your posts, but if you don’t post, you won’t receive inbounds. Simple. What founder will message me next 💰

When we started Treyd Secrets, the idea was to get deep into the supply chain, finance and operations of running a product business. The latest conversation with Kareem Raslan is a pretty good example of why we started it. Here’s one hands-on exercise for any product business founder: go and find the costs hiding in your operations. BrainGain sells some pretty heavy products and they had one product split across three boxes, each weighing around 28kg. Then they dug into their fulfilment costs and realised they were getting hit with additional handling charges above 25kg. So they moved from three boxes to four. More boxes, but 20% lower fulfilment cost. Another practical tip for anyone selling cross-border: Go into PayPal, export your transactions, put the data into Claude and ask it to summarise your payment processing fees across different currencies. As he put it, you might be horrified by what you find – but at least then you can do something about it. Payment processing, FX, 3PL surcharges, packaging all add up and with enough volume a few percentage points here and there really matter. A reminder to actually get into the detail of where your money is going. Worth a listen if you’re running a product business.