You can see the revenue from here, and so it should be. Twelve months of work, a number you would once have called a dream (remember those days?). And still, before you signed off on your last hire, you checked the bank account. Quietly, with the door closed, because a business this size is supposed to have outgrown that habit, right?
The habit is totally rational. Two numbers in your business have quietly separated, and nobody on your payroll is responsible for measuring the space between them.
The claim is that the gap between what your business earned and what it kept is structural. It can be measured, priced, closed, and kept closed. Let me tell you this: discipline was never the issue.
Exhibit A: the industry cannot keep what it earns
SPI Research’s 2026 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark surveyed 509 services organisations, and here are the findings. On revenue, the average firm hit 90.1% of its target last year. On margin, 88.8%, and only 17.2% of them hit that margin target in full.
Good at earning, poor at keeping. The pattern I always see even with my clients. And the pattern repeats in every single year of the study. Getting the revenue is the part your business already knows how to do. It opens up after the invoice is paid, and you have likely felt that from the inside, without a benchmark to prove it.
Exhibit B: the leak is not where you have been looking
The same benchmark contains a stranger fact. Project margins across the industry are at a five-year high. Revenue leakage, the money lost to unbilled work and write-offs, is at a five-year low. And yet (believe it or not), what those firms actually keep before tax and financing sits 28% below their own five-year average (EBITDA, if you want the technical name).
Hold those three facts for a quick sec. Every individual project is priced better than ever. Less money is leaking out of delivery than ever. And the firm as a whole keeps less than it has in years. See where I'm getting at?
The distance between earned and kept does not live inside your projects. It lives between them: bench time, overhead that grew layer by layer, pay decisions made in isolation, cash sitting in the wrong places. The places nothing in your monthly figures owns (your profit and loss, if you speak accountant).
This took the biscuit. When asked how they plan to fix profit, executives in the same study ranked more marketing and more selling as their top two answers (silent scream).
Clarity is essential here. The industry is trying to out‑earn a distance it has never measured. Imagine running a marathon without knowing how far you need to go, you just keep running because you don’t know when to stop. You lack information about how far you’ve already run, how far you’ve gone, and how far you still must travel, so the arithmetic doesn’t cooperate. Earning more expands the top line, making revenue appear strong, but the distance remains unmeasured and continues to widen.
Exhibit C: the institutions had to be forced into clarity
I spent 20 years building the systems inside institutions like HSBC Private Bank, Natixis and Zurich. Always around some regulatory change both nationally and globally. One assignment stays with me: implementing the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) across HSBC’s European entities, with every legal entity from France to Malta coordinating on a single, consistent standard, held to the strictest regulator in the room (them fines are no joke).
Remove the acronym and the directive demanded one thing above all: clarity on costs, charges, and benefits. Every investment firm/house had to comply with the directive if it wanted to continue operating in the European Economic Area. Every fund a client held had to show exactly what they were being charged and what income it could reasonably produce. Banks assembled think tanks and spent fortunes to make that visibility a reality, because the go-live date was fixed and the fines for missing it were steep.
I remember the business owners I sat across from early in my career at Lloyds. Later, regulators emphasized the link between cost and outcome.
The owners I dealt with early on were seeking loans, while those I met later wanted to maximize their investments. The latter had disposable incomes above £5 million.
There was a disparity between the two groups, and no one was legislating clarity for those below that threshold. In fact, there is no MiFID II for businesses; you are the regulator. You must ensure that your costs, charges, and benefits are transparent to you. There is no regulator to fine anyone unable to see the revenue costs and the amount they can retain.
These banks were forced into clarity. Owners can choose to be clear, and the clearer you are, the better decisions you make, leading to higher revenue and greater profit to keep.
The verdict
I call it the Revenue-Profit Leak, the distance between Earn and Kept, or the gap between what a business earns and what the owner actually keeps. Measuring that gap is essential, because the leaks occur where the gap widens. As the saying goes, what you don’t measure, you don’t fix. First, measure the distance; then implement a system that tracks both figures together so you always know how much is made, what the gap is, and what you keep.
The problem is that everything is scattered and few people connect the dots to gain this insight. The market determines your revenue, and your goals and structure determine what you keep. To meet those goals, you need a proper structure, and that structure is the mechanism we’re discussing.
What to do with this
Take your last full quarter. Write two numbers side by side. Got it?
First: what your business earned.
Second: what your business kept, meaning your own pay plus the profit that stayed in the business. Normally, most owners can produce the first number from memory. If producing the second one takes you more than five minutes, you have just met the leak’s first symptom: the distance in your business is real, and nothing is currently measuring it.
That is the difference measurement makes. The next hire gets decided from a screen, with the door open.
If the second number was the hard one, case #002 is about the part of it you control directly: what you pay yourself, and why “I reinvested it” is the most respectable thing standing in that number’s place.
The sidebar · one number
9.9%. That is what the average firm among those 509 keeps out of every dollar it earns, before tax and financing (EBITDA). Yep, you read that right.
It sits 28% below its own five-year average, in a year when project margins were the best in five years. Less than a tenth of everything they earn survives into profit.
Where do you sit against that number? If you do not know, that is the more interesting finding.
Next: case #002, the pay line you keep crossing. That was a fun write. It argues that what you pay yourself is a number you should be able to say out loud in a heartbeat, and that the most respectable thing standing in its place is the word ‘reinvestment’.
P.S. Try the two-number exercise before you close this. C’mon, go on. If the second number was not there when you reached for it, that is the finding. The Profit Scan measures the distance properly: where it opens and what closing it is worth. $297, one link, no call. See where your profit goes
One question, and a one-line answer is all it takes: which of the two numbers took you longer to find?
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. The Profit Scan ($297). The Profit Audit. Profit Advisory.
Know an Owner with strong revenue and mystery profit? Forward this.