Free live masterclass · Wednesday, November 18 · 11am Eastern
Your business is profitable. It's just profitable because of you.
Profit Like a CEO. 90 minutes on how to build a business that holds itself up, so your best month stops depending on your hardest week.
For owners of service businesses doing $1M or more who are still the person everything runs through.
Without adding a day to your week, hiring another person, or learning to read a balance sheet.
If you're doing $1M or more, you're already in rare air.
Fewer than 2 out of every 100 businesses that start small cross $1M within 5 years.
And if you're being honest about your calendar, some version of this is also true:
- You're making real money, and growth keeps asking for more of you, not less.
- Your day is full of decisions only you can make, and most of them are not that important.
- You can tell me what you sold last month faster than you can tell me what you kept.
- You set out to build a company, and what you built is a very good job you can't quit.
That last one has a name. I call it the profit prison, and you don't get into it by failing. You get in by succeeding. The business works, it works because of you, and every good year makes that more true instead of less.
Here's what that looks like in a normal week
It's a Tuesday in November. Your best person asked you for a raise last week, she has earned it, and you heard yourself tell her you'd circle back once you had a chance to look at some numbers. You've been circling back for 3 weeks.
It isn't that the money isn't there. You just had the best year you've ever had. Your accountant sent the statements over and told you they look good, and you took her word for it, because what else are you going to do. What you can't tell is whether saying yes to her in November means finding out in March that you shouldn't have.
So you do what's always worked, which is go sell more work. You take the project you'd normally have passed on. You stay late to keep it from slipping. You figure that if revenue is up again next quarter, the raise pays for itself.
It doesn't answer itself. January comes and she asks again, or she stops asking, which is worse.
I have some version of this conversation every year about now, and it's almost never about the money.
Nothing is wrong with you. You're not bad with money and you're not a bad boss. You just don't have anything to point at, so a call like that one comes down to how you feel about it that day, and how you feel is a terrible way to run payroll.
Growth didn't cause that. Growth revealed it. The business got built around your judgment, and every year it gets bigger, more of it rests on you. Walk out for 2 weeks and you'd find out exactly which parts. You hired to get leverage, and what you got was a bigger thing depending on you. You're not running the business. You are the beam holding it up.
Profit isn't a report you receive 3 weeks after the month closed. It's a decision you make over and over, all month long.
More profit doesn't come from more effort. It comes from seeing your business clearly enough to make the call yourself, and then telling your team what the call was and holding them to it. That's how you get to a year where you pay her more and you keep more. That's what these 90 minutes are about.
3 things happening in your business right now
The decision that has to wait.
You know your numbers are being handled, and they are. But when something lands on your desk that needs a yes or a no, you don't ask for the numbers so you can decide. You ask somebody whether it's a good idea. There's a difference between those 2, and it's the reason every call takes a week longer than it should.
The work that keeps coming back.
You handed it off, it came back, and you fixed it yourself again. You feel let down and you can't quite explain what was wrong with what they gave you, which makes it hard to say anything at all.
The hire that changed nothing.
You brought somebody on, or you bought the software, or you added the service line. It felt like progress at the time. You look at the numbers 6 months later and the line is flat.
Those are symptoms, and every owner I work with has at least 2 of them.
In the class I will show you the 3 mistakes underneath them, including the one almost nobody sees, which is usually the one doing the most damage.
What you walk out with
- You'll know which of the 3 is costing you the most right now, and it is almost never the one owners expect.
- You'll know the single number that tells you whether your business runs on structure or runs on you.
- And you'll know what to do about it on Monday, which is a different thing from knowing what to do about it someday.
Live attendance only
Stay to the end and you'll get your Owner Dependency Score
It's a short exercise you run on your own business in about 10 minutes. You draw how a client actually moves through your company, from the first time they hear your name to the day the work is delivered, and then you mark every step that still requires you personally. What you get at the bottom is a number.
Most owners find that more than half of their steps still have their own name on them, and seeing it written in their own handwriting lands differently than hearing somebody say it.
Proof and fit
What it looked like before
“I always had a general sense of our income, but I never had a clear picture of expenses or actual profit, and I had no way of knowing whether the data being entered was even accurate.”
“Today, I'm in a much better position to be proactive rather than reactive. I can get ahead of issues before they spiral, instead of discovering them 4 to 6 months later, which was often the case before.”
What it looks like to decide from a number
“Now we could see exactly where our money was coming from, where our money was going. She was able to show us, ‘This is how much you spent on ads this month, and here's how much you brought in this month.' And then we looked at the next month: you doubled your ad spend and you doubled your income. So go spend more money on ads, because it's clearly working. We didn't have that before, because we didn't have that clarity.”
What it does to a team
“You helped me find my Northstar. That clarity changed everything. Once we defined it, my team ran with it, and that's when the momentum really started to build.”
This is for you if
You run a service business doing $1M or more with a team of 3 or more, you're profitable on paper, and you're still the person who catches everything before it hits the floor. You're not looking for permission to work less. You're looking for a business that doesn't require quite so much of you to keep standing.
This isn't for you if
You want a template you can install, or you want to hand leadership off to somebody else entirely. The whole point of this is that you lead it better, with something objective in your hand, not that you lead it less.
Who is teaching it
I'm Brittany McKnight. I am a CPA who trained under the CFO of a $300M group, and I have spent 6 years inside founder-led businesses watching the same pattern repeat in industry after industry.
I'm not going to teach you accounting, and you won't need any. What I'm going to do is show you what your own numbers are already telling you about how your business is built, which is usually something nobody has ever pointed out to you before.
The structure is the strategy.
Why now and not January
You're about 6 weeks out from deciding what next year looks like. Most owners decide it the same way they decided this one, which is take this year's revenue, add a percentage, and go work harder against the number. That's how you get another year of more volume and the same margin.
Right now is the only point in the year when your numbers are finished enough to be real and recent enough to still sting. By February you're already running the plan you wrote in December.
Profit Like a CEO
Wednesday, November 18, 11am Eastern. 90 minutes including Q&A. Live only, and there's no replay.
Questions people ask
- Is there a replay?
- No, this one's live only, and the Owner Dependency Score is only for people on the call.
- Do I need to understand accounting?
- Not at all. If you can read a bank balance, you can follow everything in this class.
- Are you going to pitch me at the end?
- Yes, briefly. I'll tell you what we do and how to work with us, and the 90 minutes stand on their own whether you take me up on it or not.
If you left for 2 weeks starting tomorrow, what's the first thing that would break?
Stop producing profit. Start architecting it.
Wednesday, November 18 · 11am Eastern · 90 minutes · live only