It does not matter how good you are doing in contrast to previous years. If your loan comes due and you can't afford another one to keep that revolving credit going you need to free up the capitol to pay.
It's all fun and games until the tide goes out. Then you suddenly might need to rollover the debt at new rates like 6% while the company earnings also go down because everyone can spend a bit less. Suddenly, you might lose a few procent (or more!) on the loans. It's a bit of a double whammy.
I can help you out here :)
In addition to revenue, debt is a source of funding for investment into growth.
For example, if you can get a return of 8% on an investment, it make sense to borrow capital at a 5% rate. But not at a 10% rate.
I know one regional company who sells nationally/internationally which has done that for decades. Decades ago, the owner asked the local bank for a growth loan for some equipment and was turned down. The next week, he found out that one of his employees, who depends 100% on his company for income, went to the same bank for a motorcycle loan and was approved. the business owner was so outraged at the bank's stupid decision-making (if the business isn't good for the money, how will the employee be good for it?) that he decided to never use bank debt for growth again. That was in the 1960s, and the company is doing great, focusing on product and service and not financial games, with very expansive and expanding facilities and workforce. The regional bank was absorbed long ago.
Remember: no matter how much banks advertise being your partner and friend, they are not.
Unless that business was the only employer in the area, the owner was basically just having a tantrum over the idea that different kinds of loans for different amounts of money might have different decision-making processes behind them. When my credit union decided to give me a car loan, they didn't look into the solvency of my employer, they just saw that I have good credit and a steady income and took a safe 5-digit gamble. It may have hurt the owner's feelings to essentially be told "we're pretty sure we can make our money back on this $1000 motorcycle loan which has a very easy-to-deal-with collateral, but we don't want to give you a $100000 for specialized equipment"
I've literally dealt with banks (US state/regional scale) as a technology business with a loan that was absolutely current and on-time every one of scores of months, and we were running profitably (small, but definitely positive). Yet, when the bank started having problems in their real-estate sector, they came and called in OUR loan. We had to seriously scramble to have it not put us out of business, cold. There were several other businesses in the area, also non-real-estate, that were caused to fail in this bank's BS moves and made the local papers.
It is not just that bank's business is making money. They have a whole bunch of internal incentives that make it perfectly OK in their eyes to fck over anyone for no reason other than to make their personal numbers this month look good. And they don't hesitate to do it.
They chose to fire thousands and yet have sufficient to invest further into markets all over the world.
Burn and churn is just much easier and lax labor laws do not prohibit such tendencies!
To be clear, this is not people being fired for bullshit jobs. This is people being fired because their 1 billion in revenue is a fraction of the 300 billion in stock price opportunity.
Ask me how I know...
But that's asking for too much from the average corporate leadership. Efficiency and technology acquisition are too much for these agents of the entrenched hegemony. So, what we have right now is a form of nationalist socialist welfare that looks like our current financial-administrative system. There's some momentum and inertia, but it's all being wasted on keeping unproductive fat cats alive.
And that's okay. Because smart people will be leaving this oppressive Egypt under a stubborn Pharaoh. For much better lands and pasture. And while that happens, profit will start to look like a heinous crime to these welfare recipients. Who naturally will not be invited to the awesome parties that's coming in the future.
Something like Eloi and Morlocks, if you wanna get biological about it. Eloi and Morlocks, though, are just the starting point. H.G. Wells didn't have anime music videos to inspire him to think about the more accurate possibilities of a matrix of biological degradation and environmental niche adaptation.
Theoretically, if a company has money to pay employees it keeps them if the present value of their project is positive, and terminate them if the present value of their projects is negative.
Let's say an employee earns $100K this year. The project they're working on this year will generate 40K of revenue in 1 year, 2 years, and 3 years. Is the project worth doing?
Let's assume the discount rate is 5%. A dollar now (which we call 'present value (PV)') is worth $1.05 a year from now ('future value (FV)'). And 1.05^2 in 2 years. And 1.05^n in n years. And a dollar in n years (FV) is worth 1/(1+discount)^n dollars today (PV). It's a mechanism similar to inflation, or paying interest. (IRL the discount rate is the WACC + some factor for riskiness, but that's too much to talk about.)
Let's say the discount rate is 5%. Is the project worth doing? The present value (PV) is -100K + 40K/1.05 + 40K/1.05^2 + 40K/1.05^3. So if you approve the project, the future profits and expenses are as if you earned $8,930 today. You approve the project.
Let's say interest rates go up, and you now need to use 10% as the discount rate. -100K + 40K/1.10 + 40K/1.10^2 + 40K/1.10^3 = $-526. If you approve the project, you will lose money. So you don't approve the project. Now you don't need the employee anymore, and you get rid of the them, by reassignment, reorganization, or layoff.
Firing people whose salaries have a dramatically positive ROIC for the company does not raise the stock price, it lowers the stock price.
The mistake, in retrospect, is the executives': they should not have over-hired in 2020.
I know it's a bizarre silver lining, but to the extent there is one, workers got capital (in the form of SBC and cash) that they otherwise "shouldn't" have. If those companies had been run more effectively, most would have never been hired in the first place.
It's kind of a crap silver lining, because we psychologically feel loss [of a job] 10x more than gain, but the realistic "market-optimal" alternative was not "I have this cushy, high paying job forever", it was actually "I have never had a cushy, high paying job".
The projections would go something like $0 two years ago, $5k last year, but then $100k next year, $5mm year after that. One day? $1B, easy.
There'd be precious little evidence to support the exponential growth hypothesis, while having 10 assigned engineers earning as much as their peers in more predictable domains.
It's easier to justify such ideas in a big, rich company when the risk free rate of return is near-zero and the profit center of the company is compounding (the growth in Ads justifies the negative ROIC everywhere else).
But when your profit center is wavering and showing worrying signs of stalling out (as Google and Meta did in 2021/22), the calculus shifts dramatically.
When you manage a company not for "growth" but for "value" (which is an inevitable part of the corporate cycle), these projects and the employees behind them are decreasingly seen as a potential source of future profits and more as a waste of increasingly valuable cash.
The future earnings should go up with inflation, but not the discount rate. The government adjusts their interest rate to maintain the rate of inflation around 2% or so. The government interest rate is often around 5%, but can vary from 0 to 20%. The discount rate (or technically the cost of capital) is the gov't interest rate plus 4% or so (the higher the better for investors).
In an environment where the "risk-free rate of return" is secularly-higher, the floor of minimal necessary productivity goes up.
Let's say the ROIC of investing $300k "into" an employee is $310k (3.33% rate of return).
If the risk free rate of return is 1%, you take that employee. If it's 5%, you fire that employee.
I think the reality is that the typical ROIC was above the typical salary, but that there was an inflection point that they crossed in the hiring spree of 2019-2021.
If you're a capital allocator (CEO), your responsibility is to maximize ROIC for shareholders over the long run. In environments where you're not absolutely confident that your eventual, steady-state employee ROIC will trounce (i.e. 2-5x's) the risk free rate of return, you should generally favor returning capital to shareholders (with dividends or buybacks) instead of putting good money after bad.