Ninety-three percent of small business owners expect their business to grow over the next year. Three in four of them are no longer using their own bank to make that growth happen.

That gap — soaring growth confidence sitting next to a quiet retreat from traditional finance — is the real finding inside OnDeck and Ocrolus's Q2 2026 Small Business Cash Flow Trend Report, published 31 July 2026. The report surveyed 805 small businesses with active working capital loans and cross-checked the results against more than 3.76 million financing applications processed over 15 months — one of the largest live datasets available on how small businesses actually fund themselves right now, not how they say they'd like to.

For a decade, the standard SME growth story ran the same way: build the case, take it to the bank, get the loan, grow. That story is now the exception, not the rule. In the OnDeck/Ocrolus data, 75% of small businesses bypassed traditional banks entirely in the second quarter of 2026 — consistent with the quarter before, meaning this isn't a blip. It's the new baseline.

At the same time, the two things owners worry about most are converging. Inflation still tops the list at 34%, but cash flow has closed to within four points of it at 30%. A year ago inflation led by a wide margin. Now the gap is nearly gone — and unlike inflation, cash flow is something an owner can actually fix.

Here's the enemy in this story: the quiet assumption that “the bank” is still the backstop under a growth plan. For most small businesses it isn't, and running a growth plan as if it still is means discovering the gap at the worst possible moment — when a big order lands and there's no working capital to fulfil it.

I run every client through a version of this before we talk about a single growth tactic, because growth without runway isn't growth — it's a countdown.

1. Days Cash on Hand vs. Days Sales Outstanding. Work out how many days your business could operate on the cash in the bank today if revenue stopped tomorrow. Then work out how long it actually takes you to get paid, from invoice to bank account. If the second number is bigger than the first, you are financing your customers, not the other way around.

2. The Capital Source Map. List every source of financing your business actually uses today — bank line, invoice finance, merchant cash advance, supplier credit, personal funds — and cost each one properly, not just by the headline rate. Non-bank capital is often faster and easier to get. It is rarely cheaper, and most owners have never lined the true costs up side by side.

3. The Inventory-to-Cash Gap. If you hold physical stock — this is where most FMCG and product businesses bleed without noticing — measure the days between paying your supplier and being paid by your customer or retailer. Every day in that gap is a day your own cash is funding someone else's shelf.

“Talking with Kevin the first time was so valuable and we were learning so much. Within an hour Kevin had us thinking about our business and our goals in a totally different way. In fact we were supposed to be catching a flight but we decided it was more important that we continued the meeting with Kevin.”

— Angus and Cameron, Flatpack Co

That's usually the moment it clicks: not a new growth tactic, but finally seeing the plumbing the growth plan depends on.

Most owners I meet could recite these three numbers back to me if pushed. Almost none of them track them on a rhythm. The obstacle isn't awareness — it's that cash flow discipline has no natural deadline the way tax or payroll does, so it gets pushed to “when things calm down,” which for a growing business never arrives. Without a system that runs the Cash Flow Runway Check on a fixed cadence, owners rediscover the same gap every single time revenue climbs.

Pull your last 90 days of bank statements and calculate your real days cash on hand — most owners are surprised by the number. List every financing source you used this year and its actual annualised cost, not just the headline rate. And if you're a product or FMCG business, calculate your inventory-to-cash gap for your single biggest SKU — it usually tells the whole story on its own.

If your growth plan for the next 12 months doesn't yet account for where the cash actually comes from, that's exactly where we start.