Plenty of businesses with rising revenue quietly run out of cash. It sounds impossible until it happens to you — sales are up, the team's flat out, and somehow there's nothing in the account when the BAS is due.
Revenue is a vanity number. It tells you how busy you are, not how healthy you are. The number that actually keeps the lights on is cash — and specifically, whether your business is structured so that profit comes first, not last.
Mike Michalowicz built a whole method around this in Profit First: instead of the old formula (Sales − Expenses = Profit, where profit is whatever's left, which is usually nothing), you flip it — take profit off the top and run the business on what remains. It works because it uses human nature instead of fighting it. We spend what's in front of us; so put less in front of us.
You don't have to adopt the whole system to get the lesson: decide what profit looks like before you spend, not after.
That shift — from chasing revenue to engineering profit — is where the Start course begins, because it's the foundation everything else is built on.
Not sure which stage you're at? The free Business Stage Assessment tells you in five minutes — and which course fits.
Annie
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