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When I first started my business, I approached budgeting with the optimism of someone who hadn’t yet been burned. I treated it like a tidy math problem: Plug in a few cost estimates, apply a sensible cushion, and the numbers would hold. At least, they did in the spreadsheet.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that business finances aren’t as predictable as most people would like. They don’t follow rules the way spreadsheets pretend they do. They behave more like weather — hard to predict, full of surprises and capable of swinging dramatically based on a single shift in