u/Ready-Trick-8228

i know this sounds like a good problem to have. it's not.

bigger customers, longer payment terms, more inventory we have to carry to fulfill larger orders. every new contract we sign basically requires us to spend money we don't have yet to deliver something we won't get paid for in 60 to 90 days.

we had to pass on a really good opportunity last month because we simply could not fund the working capital to take it on. told the customer we were at capacity. we were not at capacity. we just couldn't afford to grow any faster.

nobody tells you that scaling can actually break your cash position. i thought more revenue fixed everything.

what do people actually do here besides get a line of credit and pray the bank approves it in time

Okay I need to get this off my chest before I have a breakdown. I have been running Meta Ads for this client for two years, big ecomm brand, skincare stuff, we have strict audiences, lookalikes from high value buyers, interests in clean beauty and all that. Budget pacing fine, ROAS solid around 4x last month.

This morning I am prepping a test campaign for their new summer line. Client wants to scale so I duplicate the main campaign to tweak creatives. I am rushing because we have a 10am call, copy paste the settings, but somehow in the audience section I leave it on broad targeting instead of our usual detailed setup. I do not even notice, hit launch, set daily budget to 10k because that is what we usually test at.
Two hours later I check in, impressions exploding at 500k already, spend at 20k, and the demographics? Grandmas in rural areas, dudes interested in fishing, people in countries we do not even ship to. CTR tanking at 0.3 percent, cost per click through the roof. I panic, pause it, but it already burned 45k by noon. Client account manager texts me WHAT THE HELL, their dashboard is blowing up with wasted impressions.

I go back to edit, realize my idiot mistake, but Meta support says broad campaigns that scale fast cannot just reverse charges, and the pacing was aggressive because broad goes nuts immediately. Total damage by end of day? 250k gone because the lifetime budget kicked in before I caught it. Client is screaming on the call, saying why are we wasting ad spend on irrelevant audiences, this proves broad targeting is just wasted impressions.

Boss is covering for me somewhat, says we can recover with a makeup campaign from our reserve budget, but I feel like absolute garbage.

So I started this LLC last year thinking it would blow up but it kinda fizzled and I completely forgot it even existed. Friend mentioned annual reports are a thing and if you miss them theres fines or worse. Is this a huge deal, would appreciate any advice