The receivable that nobody on the founder's team will call.
Almost every founder-led business has one.
A large customer, ten or fifteen years of relationship, Rs. 3 to Rs. 4 Cr sitting in receivables aged past 180 days. The accounts team has stopped escalating it. The CFO has raised it twice. The founder has said he will handle it personally. He has not.
The reason is rarely the money. It is that the customer was there in the early years, when the business needed someone to say yes. The founder cannot make that call now without feeling like he is breaking something older than the company.
So the receivable stays. It quietly funds the customer’s working capital out of yours. It distorts your own DSO, your bank’s comfort with your limits, and the price any future buyer will pay for the business.
A friendship that lives on the balance sheet is not a friendship. It is a loan you never agreed to give.
Have you watched a founder carry a receivable he refused to chase? In one line, what eventually moved it?
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