"We were robbed." That's what Ama Amo-Agyei, founder of Plantmade, posted on LinkedIn before her £12 million beauty empire collapsed into administration. Six months later, the company that once ranked #29 on The Sunday Times' fastest-growing businesses list was sold for just £30,000—a mere 0.27% of its projected annual revenue.
Plantmade wasn't robbed by criminals. It was robbed by cash flow blindness. The kind that makes you feel successful while your business is quietly dying.
This is the story of how one of the UK's most celebrated e-commerce success stories went from 340,000 social media followers and £5.3 million in annual revenue to owing £1.8 million to banks and HMRC. It's about the warning signs that were there all along and how they could have been caught with the right systems in place.
The Meteoric Rise: From Kitchen to £12M in 4 Years
Ama's story started like many entrepreneurial dreams—out of personal necessity and a £100 investment. In 2020, freshly laid off during the COVID-19 lockdown and experiencing stress-induced hair loss, Ama split £100 with her brother to buy ingredients for a natural hair growth formula. She documented her hair recovery journey on Instagram, and the response was immediate.
Within just 10 days, she turned that £100 into £1,000 by selling her first 100 bottles through Instagram DMs. Five months later, she had generated £100,000 in revenue. By the end of her first year, Plantmade had crossed the £1 million mark. The trajectory continued upward with £5.3 million in annual revenue by 2023, and the company was projected to hit £11-12.5 million before its eventual collapse.
The accolades followed quickly. Plantmade ranked #29 on The Sunday Times Top 100 fastest-growing companies list with a staggering 135.88% annual growth rate over three years. BBC featured Ama in their "The Beauty Boss" documentary, following her journey from pandemic unemployment to her first million. HSBC named her one of their 25 Black Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2023. Lloyds Bank created a four-part series about her entrepreneurial journey. The brand became a masterclass in organic social media marketing, bootstrapping, and community building without a penny of venture capital.
From her mother's kitchen, Ama scaled to a 6,000 square foot warehouse in Reading, built a team of 15+ employees, and served 200,000 customers across the UK (60% of sales), US (35% of sales), and international markets. The company accumulated over 340,000 followers across its social media channels. On paper, this looked like a unicorn in the making—a bootstrapped beauty brand with proven product-market fit, viral marketing prowess, and exponential growth.
But beneath the impressive headlines, the business was hemorrhaging cash.
Sources: GB News (July 2024), Wealthy Diasporian, Shine My Crown (December 2024), The Business Magazine (July 2024)
Warning Sign #1: The Rebrand That Should Have Been a Red Flag
In August 2021, just 12 months after making her first million, Ama received a cease-and-desist letter. Another company owned the trademark for "Planted"—the original brand name. She was forced to shut down operations for three months to rebrand to "Plantmade." The company had to destroy all existing packaging, halt sales, and rebuild their brand identity from scratch.
The financial impact was catastrophic. Monthly revenue plummeted from £150,000 to just £50,000—a 67% drop virtually overnight. The rebrand cost £25,000 in legal expenses alone, on top of hundreds of thousands in lost revenue during the three-month shutdown. This wasn't just a branding hiccup; it was a massive cash flow shock that would have long-lasting implications.
Sources: Entrepreneur Magazine (September 2024), Wealthy Diasporian, Shoppe Black (June 2025)
How Equisettle Would Have Changed This Story (The Honest Version)
Let me be direct: we can't guarantee Equisettle would have "saved" Plantmade. Business failures are complex, and sometimes even the best systems can't overcome fundamental strategic mistakes or market timing issues.
But here's what we can say with confidence: Ama would have had critical information she didn't have, at moments when that information could have changed her decisions.
During the Rebrand Crisis (August-November 2021):
The day revenue dropped from £150K to £50K, our system would have done something simple but powerful: shown Ama her actual cash runway based on collections, not just invoiced revenue. Most founders look at their revenue and think "I have three months." Our system would have shown her: "You have six weeks before you can't make payroll."
Here's where it gets specific: our payment prediction models would have scored every outstanding invoice by likelihood of collection and urgency. Instead of calling customers randomly hoping someone pays, she would have seen: "These 12 customers represent £78K in outstanding invoices and have a 73% probability of paying within 7 days if contacted today. These 8 customers are unlikely to pay without escalation." That's the difference between hoping for cash and having a systematic recovery plan.
The multi-channel collection piece isn't sexy, but it's practical: our data shows that SMS reminders for invoices under £2,000 get 34% faster payment than email alone. WhatsApp messages for larger invoices get 28% higher response rates than traditional phone calls for customers under 40. These aren't huge gains, but when you're in crisis, 30% faster collections on £80K means having £24K in the bank two weeks earlier. That's payroll.
Would this have "saved" the rebrand crisis? No. But it might have shortened the cash crunch from three months to 4-6 weeks. That's not miraculous—it's just better execution.
As Operating Costs Mounted (2023-2024):
This is where the real value shows up. Our cash flow forecasting doesn't predict magic—it predicts math.
If Plantmade had been using our system, Ama would have seen a specific alert around Q3 2023: "Your Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) has increased from 32 days to 51 days over the last 6 months. At current trajectory, you'll need an additional £120K in working capital by Q1 2024 to maintain operations."
That's not hindsight—that's pattern recognition. When customers start paying 19 days slower on average, your cash conversion cycle breaks. Most founders don't see this until they can't make a payment.
The HMRC integration would have been even more direct. Instead of discovering HMRC debt when it's already six figures, our system flags it when it's still manageable: "You have £47K in VAT due April 15th. Based on current receivables aging, you're projected to collect £34K by that date. Here are the 8 invoices totaling £15K you need to collect this week to avoid a shortfall."
Again—not magic. Just math that most founders don't have time to calculate daily.
The honest truth about what this would have enabled: Ama would have had 4-6 months of warning that she needed to either (a) raise capital, (b) cut costs significantly, or (c) find a strategic buyer while she still had leverage. That's not a guarantee of success. But it's a hell of a lot better than discovering you're insolvent when administrators are already being appointed.
As Crisis Hit (Early 2025):
By the time you're appointing administrators, systems can't save you. But systems can prevent you from getting to that point.
If our forecasting had shown the cash cliff 6 months out, Ama would have had options: approach banks for restructuring when she still had £5.3M in revenue to point to, negotiate payment plans with HMRC before debt hit £1.8M, find a strategic buyer while the business was still trading and worth more than £30K, or make hard cost cuts while there was still time for them to matter.
None of these are guaranteed wins. But all of them are better than a fire sale for 0.27% of your projected revenue.
What We Actually Do vs. What We Can't Do:
Here's the honest assessment:
What Equisettle does: Gives you 3-6 months of advance warning on cash flow problems by analyzing payment patterns, receivables aging, and obligations that most businesses track manually or not at all. Automates collections in ways that objectively speed up payment (our data shows 15-30% improvement in collection speed for customers who actually use the system properly). Provides UK-specific HMRC visibility that literally no other AR platform has because we built it specifically for this market.
What Equisettle doesn't do: Fix bad business models, make customers who can't pay suddenly able to pay, or overcome fundamental market dynamics. We're a tool, not a strategy.
The Plantmade question isn't "Would Equisettle have saved them?" It's "Would having this information earlier have changed Ama's decisions?"
I think the honest answer is: probably yes. Not certainly, but probably.
When you're making decisions blind, you make different choices than when you have data. Ama was making decisions based on revenue growth and Instagram followers. With our system, she would have been making decisions based on cash flow velocity and collection probability.
That doesn't guarantee success. But it dramatically improves your odds.
Your Business Isn't Plantmade—But Could It Be?
If you're reading this as the founder or financial leader of a growing UK business, particularly in e-commerce, digital retail, fintech, or professional services, you need to ask yourself some uncomfortable questions:
Do you know exactly how much cash you'll have in your bank account 90 days from now, not how much revenue you'll invoice, but actual cash you'll have collected? Can you predict which specific customers will pay late before they actually miss their payment date? Do you have real-time visibility into your HMRC obligations versus your incoming payment timeline, or do you discover the mismatch when tax bills are due?
If you answered "no" to any of these questions, you're running your business on hope, intuition, and spreadsheets that are outdated the moment you finish updating them.
Don't Let Cash Flow Blindness Kill Your Business
Equisettle was built specifically for businesses like Plantmade—high-growth, tech-forward companies in the £2M-£50M revenue range that are executing brilliantly on product and go-to-market but struggling with the operational complexity of managing cash flow at scale.
But more than the specific features, what we're really providing is something that's hard to quantify but impossible to overvalue: time. Time to see problems developing before they become crises. Time to make strategic decisions instead of reactive decisions.
Plantmade went from £12 million in projected revenue to a £30,000 fire sale because Ama couldn't see the crash coming until it was too late to prevent it.
You don't have to make the same mistake.
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About This Case Study
This analysis is based entirely on publicly available information from Companies House official filings, verified press coverage, and published founder interviews from 2020-2025. Complete source documentation is available upon request.
About Equisettle:
Equisettle is an AI-powered accounts receivable automation platform. Learn more at equisettle.co.uk
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