The issue
A voice note arrived from a stranger on a Wednesday.
He opened with charm: "I hope you don't mind the voice note, I thought it would be a nice change from the 87 DMs you probably received this week." It was, and I listened to the end.
Then came the proof, the line he had clearly used before because it works: "that's how we helped a client achieve his first $450,000 month."
$450,000.
Nothing about what that client kept. Nothing about what the month cost to deliver, or whether the owner paid himself out of it. The revenue was the credential, offered the way you would offer a reference.
He meant well, and it is a perfectly normal thing to say.
The case before us
Every owner I speak to wants both, more revenue and more profit, in that order, on the understanding that the second follows the first.
Most times, when we talk about profit, the answer arrives immediately. More sales. More revenue is more profit.
The claim: more revenue does not turn into more profit by itself. Profit is an allocation decision, made before the money lands. A business that never makes that decision has still made one, and it made it for revenue.
Exhibit A: the industry's own plan for its profit
SPI Research's 2026 benchmark covers 509 professional services firms. It asks their executives how they plan to improve profits and has them score each step from one to five. SPI's own summary: executives "believe improving marketing and sales will be the most important way to improve profits."
Firms of 10 to 30 people were the most certain.
Improve marketing: 4.10.
Improve sales: 4.01.
Improve utilisation, meaning how much of the time you already pay for actually gets billed: 3.84.
Asked how to make more profit, the industry's answer is to make more revenue.
I understand why. Selling looks like progress. It is the same pull as spending three hours a day on LinkedIn because that is what you are told to do, when the networking session that means leaving the house at five in the morning is the one that brought in your best clients. Activity feels productive. It doesn't necessarily mean it is.
Exhibit B: what the growth costs
The same benchmark breaks the income statement down by firm size.
Firms under 10 people kept 14.8 cents of every revenue dollar as profit (SPI measures it before interest, tax and depreciation).
Firms of 10 to 30 kept 6.4 cents.
Less than half.
A large part of the gap sits in one line. SPI's "all other" overhead line, the running costs no client is billed for, runs at 4.0% of revenue in the smaller firms and 15.3% in the 10 to 30 band.
The revenue goes up, and you don't realise that everything else is going up with it. Have we costed what the growth is going to be? The team of twenty arrives, everyone sells, the top line climbs, and the costs climb faster.
Two cautions. These are different firms in a single year, and SPI says that across its whole sample, size did not significantly change profitability. The same 10 to 30 band made 12.0% the year before. So treat it as what a hard year can look like at the size where an owner-led firm stops being small.
And you are not Uber. Twitter and Uber could run for years without a profit because they had big investors willing to wait for a return that came far down the line. Their exit game is different from yours.
Exhibit C: the decision, made in advance
In the institutions I built systems for, when an employee was given a spend, the spend was capped. It was never a black card you swipe internally. The money was allocated before anyone needed it, and the systems enforced the cap.
In the firms I work with, it runs the other way round. Money lands, and it goes to whatever is loudest that week.
It is one of the reasons I picked up Profit First, one of the methods I use: everything is allocated beforehand. It takes the emotion out, because the allocation happens when you are level-headed and not in the thick of it. When you are in the thick of it, everything is flying at you.
So when an allocation runs out, it is a sit-down moment. What happened? Where did the money go?
Sometimes the answer is an overspend, and that is fine if you knew. You knew you didn't have the money for it, you took it from elsewhere, and it was an intentional decision. That is not as scary. The scary one is the overspend that catches you off guard. I did not know. I did not realise.
At every Forward View, the monthly review I run with an Advisory client, I run three scenarios, the good, the bad and the ugly, so that when the ugly one arrives, the decisions are already written down.
There is also a tell that a firm has quietly picked revenue. Your best seller is not necessarily your most profitable. The client you have had for three years may not be making you any money. That is a hard conversation, and the data for it is already there.
In case no. 002 I argued that your own pay is the first thing to fall by the wayside while the business carries on growing. It falls for the same reason. It was never set aside before the money arrived.
The verdict
More revenue, or more profit? Profit, because it is the only one of the two that has to be decided. Revenue arrives on its own schedule. Profit is the share you set aside before it arrives, and a firm that never sets it aside has left the decision to whichever bill arrives first. In the Profit M.A.P, the framework I use with clients, that decision is the Allocate step, and it comes before growth.
What to do with this
One memory, two numbers.
Think back to the last time a big client left.
Write down the first thing you cut, and how many days after they left you cut it.
Then write down what share of every dollar that client paid you was already set aside as profit before it reached your account.
If the first answer came quickly and the second was a blank, the allocation was never made. The business spent the profit before you could take it out, and the client leaving is only when you found out.
In case no. 003 I argued that you need to see your numbers before you hire someone to run them. This is the same order of operations, applied to where the money goes.
The sidebar · one number
85.5%.
That is how much of their annual margin target firms of 10 to 30 people reached last year, the lowest of any size band in SPI's benchmark. The same firms reached 88.3% of their revenue target.
They came closer to the number they sell than to the number they keep.
Next: case no. 005, on why you cannot see your own profit until it is too late.
P.S. If the second number was a blank, that is the finding, not a failure. I'm the what is left. I deal with what is left. The Profit Scan is my read of your numbers, so you can see where the revenue went and what it left you. $297. No call: See where your profit goes
One question, and a one-line answer is all it takes: when that client left, what did you cut first?
Until next Sunday,
Anwin
Anwin Mbah spent 20 years building the systems inside HSBC, Natixis and Zurich that let institutions see their money. A Case for Profit applies that discipline to yours. Wealthfluency is the practice behind it. The Profit Scan is where owners start, at $297, and the Audit and Advisory are what follow.
Know a business owner who wants to make more and keep more? Forward this.