Your Latte Line™: Why Every Business Needs a Margin of Safety
- James C Foo Leong
- Jun 15
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 28
Know Your Latte Line™: Do You Have a Margin of Safety?
She didn’t see it coming. Her longest-serving team lead resigned with notice. On the same day, their largest client asked for a payment extension. Cash flow was already tight. Payroll was due in five days.
The business looked fine—until it wasn’t.
Building Your Margin of Safety
Resilient businesses are structured differently. They track timing gaps. They manage liquidity deliberately. They build a margin of safety in their system, so they aren’t forced into reactive decisions when pressure builds.
In my work, I call this the Latte Line™.
The Buffett Buffer: How the Best Investors Think About Margin of Safety
Warren Buffett is a strong advocate of the concept of margin of safety — a principle he credits to his mentor, Professor Benjamin Graham, the legendary investor and author of The Intelligent Investor.
Buffett famously applies this by buying a dollar for 50 cents. The idea is simple: build in a wide enough buffer, so even if your assumptions are wrong, you still land safely. Margin of safety protects against both visible risks and hidden vulnerabilities.
Running a business is no different.
You can’t forecast every disruption — but you can prepare for it. A margin of safety gives you breathing room when reality doesn’t follow the plan.
It’s the same idea behind the Latte Line™: when you’re already filled to the brim, the smallest jolt creates a spill. A resilient business makes room before it’s forced to. It doesn’t run at the edge.
I support leadership teams and organisations in transforming how they engage with finance. Through keynotes and company-wide rollouts, I help teams build the confidence and capability to connect numbers to business decisions — with clarity, without jargon, and always with impact in mind.
Because sometimes the smartest move is creating space — not just chasing more.
James The Financial Storyteller
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