When you’re running out of cash, you really need to be very friendly with your bank manager.

I spent Monday morning working out my new business’s current burn rate (i.e. how long it will take to eat all up my cash). Not the cheeriest way to start a week, but there was an important point behind it: I needed to know how long I could realistically put off the decision about whether to pull the plug. The thing is I’m still completely torn – I went home on Friday convinced it was worth persevering, and by Sunday night had gone entirely the other way. So basically I wanted to work out how long I’ve got to prevaricate.

The answer, as it turns out, is about five months (on the most pessimistic view). But really, the main thing I concluded from the exercise was that if I wait until it gets anywhere near that stage, I’m just being a total wimp.

I also decided to bite the bullet and have a chat with my bank manager. Now I really like my bank manager. He’s efficient, he’s straightforward, and he knows his stuff. But I really didn’t want to tell him. As soon as you start talking about overdrafts and additional financing, you can almost hear the internal alarm bells going off in his head. I imagine some great big flashing red light back at HQ, with besuited minions sliding down poles to print off copies of our latest accounts and start chewing their pencils suspiciously. Just asking for a meeting is bad enough, because let’s face it – if you’re asking to see the bank manager rather than the other way round, they pretty much know it’s because you want more money off them.

But again, it seemed unavoidable. Extended overdrafts, loans, invoice discounting… I need to know whether I can get my hands on extra cash should I decide to keep going – and if so how and when. I’ve also been contemplating the possibility of spinning the new bit out as a separate entity, to make sure it doesn’t affect the rest of the business; admittedly this would be difficult in practical terms, given that they share loads of the same resources (like office space, stationery, IT systems, and, not insignificantly, me) but it might be a possible compromise solution. So I needed to know how that might work money-wise.

Unfortunately, you don’t need me to tell you that bank managers aren’t what they used to be. I’m with [a state-supported bank], and I’ve never had a moment’s trouble with them, even in the last year – they know exactly how we work and what they’re into, so they’re very comfortable with it. But as soon as I started talking about new ventures and extra facilities and so on, I could see him getting visibly nervous. Sure, the bank will insist publicly that it’s going to play ball and lend more to small businesses. But it’s pretty obvious to me that the message coming down from on high is: don’t take any unnecessary risks. Squeezing more cash out of him will be like getting blood out of a stone.

I know I said that I don’t generally take too much notice of other people’s opinions when it comes to decisions like this. But the bank manager’s different. Because a business lives or dies on the strength of its bank balance, he becomes a bit like a sports referee (at least in theory): his decision is final, regardless of whether it’s right or wrong. So our meeting didn’t exactly leave me brimming with optimism...