For many of us, one phrase brings the entire Silicon Valley Bank debacle home: making payroll.
Of course this impacts the salaried workers wanting to make sure they can pay rent, the daycare bill, groceries. But for a smaller subset who actually run businesses, making payroll is basically everything, the barometer of whether you get to exist another week. In this uncertain 2023 especially, against layoffs, rising interest rates, and tighter spending, payroll remains that fixed number on the back of the envelope. Divided into cash reserves to see how many weeks you can go on. Multiplied by a certain number of weeks to set, say, a sales goal. Circled, as if to say, you just need to get this far this week.
Making payroll is the least-talked-about miracle on Main Street. So as founders who bank with Silicon Valley Bank panicked this…
