Coffee producers, exporters & brokers · Latin America

We fix your cash flow so you can buy the next container.

You already earned the money. It's sitting in a mill, at a port, or in somebody's payment terms. We find it, we free it up, and we hand you back a business that can grow without holding its breath.

Yes, there's trading and risk software underneath. No, that's not what you're buying.

Where the cash actually sits Illustrative — 8 containers/month, green coffee, ex-Colombia
Running on spreadsheets and WhatsApp 90 days · $1.4M tied up
Running on a cash position you can see 45 days · $700k tied up
Paid the grower Sitting at the mill Trilla & outturn In transit / at port Waiting on the buyer

Forty-five days of your own money, handed back. That's the next two containers you didn't think you could afford.

The problem

Your money isn't missing. It's just somewhere you can't reach it.

Nobody in this business loses money in one big obvious event. You lose it four days at a time, in five places, and none of them show up on a P&L as anything other than a slightly worse year than you expected.

01You pay the grower day 0 Cash goes out. You own parchment you can't sell yet, and a payment you'll reconcile from a stack of WhatsApp messages sometime next week.
02It sits at a mill you don't own +7 to 30 Somebody else is holding six figures of your coffee. You know roughly how much. You don't know exactly, and you find out when they tell you.
03Trilla, and the outturn you actually got +3 to 10 The factor comes back a point or two light. Once, that's coffee. Every time, that's a number nobody is tracking — and it's yours.
04In transit, at the port, on the water +14 to 40 Storage. Demurrage because a document reached the wrong inbox. A vessel that waited on paperwork you'd already signed.
05You wait on your buyer +30 to 60 You shipped it. It's theirs. The money is still theirs too, on terms you agreed to when you had less leverage than you have now.

Every one of those is a day, and every day is interest on coffee you already bought. Ninety days of cycle on eight containers a month is well over a million dollars of your own money that you can't spend — which is why the next container always feels like a stretch.

How we're different

We don't do it better. We do it differently.

There are good trading systems out there. We're not trying to win a feature comparison against them — we're not in the same business.

A conventional CTRM
CTRM Brothers
Sells you software
Sells you a cash position
$100k a year, plus three times that to implement
Ninety days free, then a price that fits your margin
Features priced in tiers you'll grow into
Every feature already on — switched off until you need it, never priced up
A six-month implementation project
Three weeks to the first thing that's actually useful
A demo of their product
A walkthrough of your book, with your numbers in it
Tells you everything it can do
Tells you what to fix first — and what not to buy from us
Built in London or Zug for a trading floor
Built for Latin America, by people who've spent twenty years in it
Where we start

Most people can't buy this because they can't scope it.

"Do I start with bills of lading? Trucking? My contracts? My position? My liquidity?" It's the honest question, and it's why so many operators look at this for two years and do nothing. So here's the answer, free, whether you work with us or not: three of those are one chain, and you start at the top of it.

Phase 1 · weeks 1–3

Contracts

Your purchases, your sales, your terms — in one record instead of four spreadsheets and a memory. Deliberately unexciting. Everything else is derived from it.

Done whenYou can say what you've bought and sold, and when it settles, without opening Excel.
Phase 2 · weeks 3–6

Position

Physical long and short, reconciled against delivery months and futures months, with your delta. The Greeks too, if you trade on them.

Done whenYour morning position check is a screen, not a rebuild.
Phase 3 · weeks 6–9

Cash, twelve weeks out

What's coming in, what's going out, what's trapped and where — including what's sitting at every mill holding your coffee. The screen you'll actually live on.

Done whenYou stop moving money between accounts on instinct.

Trucking and bills of lading matter. They're also a separate track that gates nothing — so they wait, and we'll tell you that even though it means selling you less.

The offer

We don't have case studies yet. That's exactly why the first ninety days are free.

We're new and there are two of us. Rob traded softs for twenty years and lived in Colombia for twenty of them. John has built and turned around five businesses, doing one thing over and over: finding the bottleneck and clearing it. The software is built. What we don't have yet is your name on a page.

So the first ninety days cost nothing. Not a free trial with a sales call at the end — ninety days of us inside your operation, founder consulting included, building this around your actual book. You spend time, not money.

If at the end of it there isn't more cash in your account, you walk away and we'll still buy you a coffee next time we're in town. We'd rather earn the case study than borrow somebody else's.

Fit

We'd rather tell you no now than disappoint you in six months.

This is for you if

  • You move roughly 2 to 15 containers a month and it's climbing
  • You're opening or widening a trade finance line and someone's started asking for numbers
  • You run on WhatsApp, spreadsheets and the fact that you personally remember everything
  • Somebody else — a mill, a warehouse, an agent — is holding coffee you paid for
  • You can name the one number that keeps you up, even if you can't calculate it

This isn't for you if

  • What you actually need is an ERP — your problem is accounting, not trading
  • You need real treasury management, FX hedging, NDFs. We don't do it and won't pretend
  • You bought a CTRM in the last three years. Come back at renewal; we'll still be here
  • You own your whole chain and nothing sits with anyone else
  • Everything is comfortable. If nothing's stuck, we'd be selling you a solution to nothing
Who you'd be working with

Two people. You'll have both our numbers.

Commodities & the system

Rob Cilento

Twenty years trading softs — coffee, cocoa, sugar — and twenty years living in Medellín. He has demoed most of the systems in this market to most of the companies in South America, and built this one because none of them fit an operation your size. Speaks Spanish. Knows the ports, the mills, and which questions actually matter.

Cash flow & bottlenecks

John Canetta

Five businesses built, and a career spent on one problem: what is the constraint, and what happens if we clear it. He's the one who'll ask why you're carrying ninety days of cycle and what it would take to carry forty. Not a coffee man — which is exactly why he asks the questions nobody in coffee thinks to ask.

Next step

Thirty minutes. No demo, no deck.

Tell us how your operation runs and we'll tell you where we think your cash is stuck. If we're wrong, you've lost thirty minutes and gained a second opinion. If we're right, you'll know the number before you decide anything.

Prefer to start by sending one trade? Send us a sale contract — buyer type, origin, port, price basis, payment terms. Fake numbers are fine. We'll build your cash position twelve weeks out and walk you through it.