When Yousef Al-Harbi opened Masir 82 Roastery in 2022, he had a problem most coffee founders know intimately: roasted coffee has a 30-day shelf life, but his cafés in Riyadh and Jeddah only paid him after 60. The math didn't work. Until it did.
"I'd be sitting on a thousand kilos of green beans I needed to roast on Tuesday, and not a single one of my best accounts had paid me from last month yet," Yousef tells me, leaning back in a chair on the second floor of his new Khobar location, which opened in March. "I was running a coffee company with the cash flow of a delivery startup."
For a long stretch in 2023, Masir 82 grew not because business was good - it was great - but in spite of how cash actually moved through the business. Yousef would buy green beans on a 30-day clock from a broker in Jeddah. He would roast them, deliver, and invoice the cafés. Then he'd wait. And wait. By the time the receivables landed, he was already two cycles deep with the broker, paying down old debt with new debt.
The compound problem of slow money
It's tempting to call this a financing problem. It isn't, exactly. Yousef wasn't unprofitable. He had healthy gross margins and a customer list that included three of the top hotel groups in the Eastern Province. The problem was timing. Specifically: the gap between when his costs landed and when his customers paid.
In trade finance, this is called the cash conversion cycle, and for a roastery it works out to something like:
- Day 0: Buy green beans on 30-day terms from broker.
- Day 5: Roast, package, deliver to cafés.
- Day 5: Invoice the cafés, with 60-day payment terms.
- Day 30: Broker invoice due. Cash on hand: zero.
- Day 65: Cafés finally pay. Cash arrives - already 35 days late on the broker.
The result is that a profitable, growing business with three hotel-group accounts behaves, financially, like it is bleeding out. Every new account Yousef won made the gap worse.
"Every time I closed a new café, my finance team would celebrate for about ten minutes. Then someone would do the math on what that account would cost us before it paid us, and the room would just go quiet." - Yousef Al-Harbi, Founder, Masir 82
What three months actually buys
When Masir 82 onboarded with Fina in November 2025, Yousef didn't ask for a loan. He asked us to pay his invoices on his behalf, sameday, and let him repay over 90 days. From his point of view, this is just a button on the invoice screen - Pay with Fina. From his suppliers' point of view, the money landed instantly, and they stopped chasing.
The interesting part isn't the cash. It's what the cash unlocks. With ninety days of cushion on the supplier side, Yousef stopped treating green-bean purchasing like a cash problem and started treating it like a sourcing problem. He could now negotiate. He could buy a full container off a Yemeni co-op direct, instead of a sack at a time from a broker, because he wasn't trying to match the buy to whichever café was paying that week.
Three things that changed in 60 days
- Direct sourcing. Container-direct buys cut his cost of goods by 18%, because the broker margin was no longer in the equation.
- Inventory discipline. He could hold a 6-week buffer of green beans, which meant fresher coffee in the cup and a stronger story for the cafés.
- Negotiating leverage. Because he could now offer his cafés sameday-payment terms (via Fina's installment product on the buyer side), he could ask for early-payment discounts from his hotel accounts. Three of them said yes.
The Khobar store
In March, Masir 82 opened its third location, in Khobar. It's a different kind of store - bar seating, a slow-bar program, a small training room. The build cost roughly 380,000 SAR. Yousef put up about a third of that in equity. The rest came from a combination of supplier financing and a Fina-funded inventory build for the launch month, which let him stock up without locking up working capital that the existing two stores were still depending on.
"The honest truth," he says, "is that I could have opened this store in 2024. I had the brand, I had the customer list, I had a landlord ready to talk. I didn't open it because every time I ran the projections, the cash gap during the ramp would have killed the original business. The thing that changed wasn't that I got richer. It was that the money started moving on a different clock."
A note on terms
Masir 82 pays Fina back over 60 to 90 days, depending on the invoice, with a flat fee disclosed up front. There is no APR, no compounding, no late-fee escalators. We talk about the math behind a flat fee in a separate post, but the short version is: a Sharia-compliant trade-finance contract isn't a loan dressed up. It is a different instrument. The fee is the price of the service, agreed once, fixed.
For Yousef, the appeal isn't theological - though that matters too. It's predictability. He knows, on the day he books the invoice, exactly what the third store will cost him in financing this quarter. He can put the number in his deck. He can put it in his budget. He can stop running cash-flow scenarios at midnight.
A coffee business should be about coffee. Most of the time, it isn't. We're trying to fix the boring part so the founders we work with can spend more time on the part that matters.