Your KPIs tell you what happened. They do not tell you what decision should happen next. Lever looks across the business to find where cash is trapped, what is causing it and who needs to act. We turn working capital into a company wide decision system built to release cash and protect liquidity.
More cash from the business you already have. No new debt. No new equity.
Most businesses can see more of their working capital than ever before. Receivables, inventory, supplier obligations, payment behaviour and liquidity forecasts are increasingly visible through ERP, BI and treasury systems.
But visibility does not determine what management should do next. A dashboard can show a collection problem. It cannot determine whether the intervention belongs with Sales, Credit, Customer Service or Collections. It can show inventory increasing. It cannot determine whether the underlying cause sits in demand assumptions, procurement, production, vendor choices or service expectations.
That is the visibility trap. Businesses can improve their ability to see working capital problems faster than their ability to act on them.
Lever connects the signal to the cause, the cause to the owner, and the owner to the intervention.
The objective is not better visibility. The objective is better decisions that release cash.
Working capital does not begin with DSO, DIO or DPO. Those metrics measure the financial consequences of decisions already made across Commercial, Operations, Supply Chain, Procurement, Treasury and Finance. Lever looks upstream to understand those decisions, downstream to understand their cash consequences, and across functions to identify where management intervention can make the greatest difference.
Working capital starts before the sale. Customer selection, commercial terms, credit decisions, order configuration, fulfilment, billing, disputes and collection priorities all influence how quickly revenue ultimately becomes cash. A healthy headline DSO can still hide weak decisions elsewhere in the cycle. Lever looks across the full Enquiry to Order to Cash journey to understand where decisions are slowing conversion and where management intervention can improve cash.
Cash collection is the outcome of a chain of decisions, not simply the responsibility of Collections.
Demand assumptions, procurement planning, vendor selection, lead times, purchasing quantities, production choices, replenishment decisions and service expectations all influence how much cash ultimately sits in inventory. By the time excess or slow moving stock appears on a report, many of the decisions that created it have already been made. Lever looks upstream as well as downstream to understand what is driving inventory investment and where management decisions can release cash without compromising the operating requirements of the business.
Inventory is the financial consequence of a series of commercial, planning, procurement and operational decisions.
When cash leaves the business is shaped by supplier selection, negotiation, purchasing concentration, contract structure and the discipline with which agreed terms are actually managed. Many businesses hold more commercial leverage than they exercise, and pay earlier than their agreements require. Lever examines the decisions behind the payables position to find where terms, timing and supplier strategy can be improved without damaging the relationships the business depends on.
Payables reflect the quality of supplier and procurement decisions, not merely the terms on a purchase order.
Forecasting accuracy, production scheduling, fulfilment routing, service commitments and the coordination between functions all influence how long cash stays committed inside the operating cycle. These decisions rarely appear on a finance report, yet they determine whether cash arrives early or late, smoothly or in a month-end scramble. Lever looks at the operating decisions that govern timing to find where cash can be freed without disrupting the business.
When cash becomes available is an operating decision before it is a finance result.
Cash concentration, funding structure, currency exposure, buffer policy and the way liquidity is forecast and governed all determine how much cash the business must hold in reserve and how much it can safely put to work. Lever examines the treasury and finance decisions that sit above the operating cycle to identify where liquidity is being held unnecessarily and where it can be released with confidence.
Liquidity headroom is the product of treasury and finance decisions, not simply a balance at a point in time.
Start where the cash problem is. Build the intelligence layer around it. Protect it with governance and risk management. Every service can be engaged independently or combined into the integrated package.
The entry point for every Lever engagement. The LWCI™ Index assesses how effectively the decisions across your working capital cycle convert activity into cash. It identifies where cash is becoming trapped, examines the drivers underneath the headline metrics, benchmarks against sector and revenue-band peers, and prioritises where management intervention should occur first. Delivered in five working days. Fixed scope. No ongoing commitment required. The objective is not simply to improve the KPI — it is to improve the cash outcome behind it.
A structured recovery of the cash trapped across all five floors of your working capital cycle. We quantify the total opportunity in dollars before the engagement starts, so you know the return before you commit. Our engagements typically reduce cash conversion cycle by 30% or more, with improvements that are permanent rather than reverting over time.
A live AI powered intelligence system built around your business. Custom AI agent embedded in your environment. Automated board packs. Live financial dashboards. 13-week rolling cash forecast. Scenario modelling on demand. The system surfaces what matters so your leadership team decides on current evidence rather than last month's report. It operates continuously, not only when an advisor is available.
Corporate-grade ERM at a cost structure accessible to mid-market businesses. Risk identification, assessment, mitigation planning, and continuous board level monitoring built as a living framework rather than a filing exercise. In the AI era, operational, financial, and technology risks compound faster than they did before. The businesses caught by them are typically the ones that could not see them coming.
Any team can deploy AI agents in days. What most cannot self-generate is the financial accountability layer that sits above them: an independent assessment of whether the AI investment is genuinely justified, whether autonomous decision-making meets board and audit standards, and whether the adoption plan will survive contact with real operations. We provide the CFO-grade challenge function that keeps AI deployment honest, before the money is spent and after the system goes live.
The integrated engagement. Working capital recovery, live intelligence layer, risk management, AI governance, and real time CFO-level strategic support combined into a single relationship built around your business. This is not a fractional CFO arrangement where you buy hours. It is a finance intelligence operation that runs continuously, scales with your business, and holds itself accountable to measurable outcomes. One engagement. Full coverage.
A fixed scope engagement for businesses navigating a specific, bounded challenge: ERP assessment or implementation, post-system performance gaps, working capital unlock as a standalone project, or pre-transaction finance readiness. We work inside the execution layer and leave the business with stronger infrastructure and measurable improvement. Fixed deliverables. Fixed timeline. Full accountability for the outcome.
We do not run a sales process. Every engagement starts with a direct conversation about your situation. We tell you what we can recover, how long it will take, and what it will cost. If the numbers do not justify the engagement, we say so before you commit to anything.
Five working days. We score your working capital position, benchmark it against sector peers, and deliver a ranked map of your cash recovery opportunity in dollars. Fixed scope. No ongoing commitment. Most clients see the full engagement ROI case before the diagnostic is complete.
Full five-floor cash recovery engagement. We quantify the opportunity before you commit, execute the recovery inside your business, and build AI monitoring to protect the improvement permanently. Engagement fee typically recovered within two to three weeks of completion.
Monthly retainer covering your chosen service combination: intelligence layer, working capital monitoring, controls, risk management, and strategic CFO support. Scoped to your situation. No fixed term. Reviewed as the business evolves.
A structured LWCI™ diagnostic run across multiple portfolio companies simultaneously. Identifies the highest cash recovery opportunity across the portfolio, ranked by impact. A single conversation with your operating partner team is the starting point.
Find where value is leaking. Fix what matters first. Build the intelligence and discipline needed to sustain the improvement permanently.
Separate symptoms from the actual bottleneck across margin, cash, intelligence, controls, risk, and decision-making velocity. Every engagement begins here before any work is scoped.
Before anything is built or changed, we put a dollar value on the opportunity. You know the return before you commit. If the numbers do not justify the engagement, we say so.
We work directly within the execution layer alongside your team. Every output is validated before it reaches your board or leadership. No recommendations handed over without accountability for the result.
The end state is a business that sees further, decides faster, and holds its improvement permanently. Dependency on the advisor is not the goal. Independence is.
Cash moves through a network of commercial, operational and financial decisions. Lever looks floor by floor to understand where cash is being delayed, absorbed or committed unnecessarily, then identifies where management intervention can have the greatest impact. Most mid-market companies carry $1M to $5M of recoverable cash across all five floors combined.
Enter your numbers below. This is the same calculation we run in every diagnostic, before anyone signs anything.
Conservative estimate. This figure reflects AR and billing acceleration only — the full diagnostic surfaces additional recovery layers not shown here.
We build the intelligence layer on top of your existing technology. No rip and replace. No new infrastructure. Connecting data that was always there but never talking to each other.
Every tool is selected because it passes the fit, ROI, and adoption test for your specific business. We work with leading AI platforms for finance, connecting seamlessly to your existing reporting, planning, and ERP infrastructure.
Lever Advisory publishes regularly on LinkedIn for finance leaders, PE operating partners, and investors who want to understand what conventional reporting is no longer telling them. Every piece is grounded in engagement experience, not theory.
DSO, DIO, and DPO each measure one part of the cash cycle. None of them measure whether the system, as a whole, is releasing the cash it should. We write about why that gap matters more than it used to, and what it costs the businesses that have not closed it.
Decision-making at mid-market scale now requires intelligence that lives ahead of monthly reporting, not behind it. We write about how finance functions are restructuring around live visibility and what that means for the CFO role itself.
For listed companies, FCF drives the multiple. For private and PE-backed businesses, it determines the exit. We write about why working capital recovery is now one of the highest-return value creation levers available and how operating partners are scoping it.
Follow for new pieces, working capital diagnostics in practice, and commentary on what is changing in mid-market finance. No spam, no sales sequences, just the writing.
Businesses rarely lack working capital data. What they often lack is a reliable way to turn that information into coordinated management action. DSO, DIO and DPO remain useful indicators, but the cash behind them is determined by decisions made across Commercial, Operations, Supply Chain, Procurement, Treasury and Finance.
Lever was created by Micheal A. Legesse to connect those decisions. We look beneath the headline metrics to understand what changed, what is driving it, where the cash impact sits, who can influence the outcome and where management intervention should happen next.
Improving the metric is not enough. The intervention has to improve the cash.
The practice operates in the UK and US, led personally by Micheal and supported by a curated bench of highly skilled and experienced professionals drawn in where their expertise is required. Every engagement is delivered inside the execution layer of the business until the outcome is measurable in cash, not on a slide. He has worked in the seat, not on the outside writing recommendations. He has also founded, scaled, and exited a commercial venture of his own. That experience matters: he understands the pressure that founders, PE-backed management teams, and growth-stage leaders face because he has carried it personally, not observed it from the outside.
Micheal is a Fellow of the ACCA, the highest designation in the profession, and holds an MBA. Lever Advisory engagements are scoped around measurable cash outcomes, not billable hours. On average, our engagements reduce cash conversion cycle by 30% or more. That is the standard we hold every engagement to, and the standard our clients hold us to.
In classical mechanics, a lever applies a small, precisely placed force to move a much larger load. The result is disproportionate output when the fulcrum is placed correctly. That principle is what this practice exists to apply in finance: finding the precise point of intervention where focused, well-placed effort produces returns far beyond what the resource deployed would suggest is possible. Disproportionate impact from disciplined, precisely applied force.
Precise force · disproportionate outcome
"Most working capital problems are not financing problems. They are process and visibility problems. The cash is already in the business. The question is whether you can see it, and whether you have the right lever to recover it."
Every engagement starts with a direct conversation. No sales pitch. A clear assessment of where and how we can help. If we cannot add value, we say so.
5-day working capital diagnostic. We score your business against the Lever Working Capital Index, benchmark it against sector peers, and quantify the cash recovery opportunity in dollars. Fixed scope. No ongoing commitment required.
Monthly retainer combining CFO intelligence, working capital monitoring, controls, risk management, and strategic support. Scoped to your situation and reviewed as the business evolves.
Time-bound fixed engagement for a specific challenge: ERP, working capital unlock, controls redesign, or ERM build. Clear deliverables, clear timeline, full accountability for the outcome.