Mid-market and owner-led organizations

This covers family businesses, and not only family businesses. Mid-sized private companies, semi-private entities, cooperatives and NGOs belong here too — forms that are common in Costa Rica and Panama. What unites them is not who owns them. It is scale combined with the absence of an institutional finance function: decisions concentrate in a few people, and the numbers arrive too late to support them.

You probably recognize this

• Cash is managed on instinct, and so far that has worked.
• You cannot show your numbers to a bank or an investor without a three-week project.
• You do not know with certainty which business line earns and which one consumes.
• There is a succession or a capital decision two to three years out.