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Episode 527 with the “Profit Doctor” Ben Hansen
Introduction
You’re listening to Leadership Powered by Common Sense with your host, Doug Thorpe. Here’s Doug.
Today we’re going to talk to the Profit Doctor, if you’ve got a business and maybe you’ve plateaued and wonder what’s going on, we may have some interesting information for you today. His name is Ben Hansen. Ben, welcome to the show.
Hey. Thanks, Doug. Thanks for having me. I’m really looking forward to it.
Meet the Guest: From Microsoft to Max Group to Profit Doctor
I always like to ask my guests to give us a little bit of backstory on their own personal journey, and how you got into doing what you’re doing now.
Absolutely. So for many years, I was in technology marketing startups, Dell, Microsoft, and then I left Microsoft in 2007 to start a company that sold consulting and staffing services back to Microsoft and other large companies in the Pacific Northwest did pretty well.
We grew to about 13 million in revenue and 100 employees over about eight years. But during that time, you know, so many things happened. And one of them was I was just laser focused around gross revenue, revenue, revenue.
The Revenue Trap
And I just had this feeling that even as my profit started going down, if I just got a few more million dollars worth of revenue, everything would work itself out. And I guess I’m here to tell you that the short version of the long story is that it turned out not to be true for me, and it created quite a number of challenges that I had to wrestle with later.
And what I found is that so many business owners or even business executives have kind of equated revenue with success. And almost like if I sell more, everything is going to work itself out.
And so as I as head wound down that old business Microsoft or sorry Max Group, you know, I really started working with other executives in and an executive coaching and business consulting. Format. And I found that, again, so many people had kind of conflated profit and revenue into one thing and were just pushing the revenue lever. And and kind of what I do now is I help people sort of rebalance a little bit.
Revenues aren’t important. We love that here at Profit Doctor, but there’s so many opportunities to maybe almost independently pull different sub levers or different buttons on your dashboard to improve profitability.
And the cool part is, a business that’s highly profitable is usually more fun to run. Certainly, of course, a lot more profitable, but often easier to grow because you don’t have that high profit. If you’re doing a lot of dumb stuff that’s dragging you down, because otherwise you wouldn’t be very profitable.
“What’s a Margin?”
Yeah, great. Great story. And I do think, and I am with you. reflecting back on my own banking days, I watched business owners that came to us, and they kept focusing on that revenue growth line, you know, saying, oh, look what we’re projecting to do.
And we would always as stodgy bankers, we were we would say, yeah, but what’s your margin on that? And they’d go margin. What’s a margin? You know we And of course that was always a red flag to start talking about.
But to your point, I agree totally. There are so many other levers that can improve that profitability. And you’re absolutely right. It means nothing if you’ve got a $5 million revenue business, but you’re not taking home any money and you’re not you’re not able to pay yourself or pay key people that you might need to grow that thing.
And the more profitable you can become, the more opportunity you create for yourself. And going from there.
Key Discussion Point 1: When Most of Your Work Is Done for Free
Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, one of my first client engagements really sort of sums up a little bit of the problem and a little bit of the solution. You know, they were a $90 million construction and manufacturing business, and they were running about 3% in that profitability.
Their goal was, how do we get to 100 million and then 120 million? And I’m scratching my head. I’d be okay if you guys go backwards to 80 million. If you can get that profit number up to 6 or 9%.
And, you know, that is a bit of an example of the the problem, right? Revenue, revenue, revenue without a maybe not equal but a healthy focus around profitability, margins, eliminating waste, things like that.
100 Plus 100 Equals 100
And then a little story, which might be a segway into some of the things that we do with people is we started looking backwards over the last two years to find out which projects that they had done were profitable or or what was the profitability of various projects.
And we’d come to find out that over the last two years, the the 25% of customers and projects that were the most lucrative, profitable and successful for them accounted for 100% of their net profitability. And you’re like, ooh, that’s pretty good, right? 8020 in action or something, you know, and then the next 50% or the big chunk in the middle. Coincidentally also responsible for 100%.
And you’re like, well, wait a minute. I graduated math in fourth grade. 100 plus 100 can equal 100. Dot dot dot. Unless the worst and lowest profit work that they had done over those two years was basically -100% of their profitability. So you could almost say the the, the worst three quarters of what they had done. They’re kind of doing it for free.
Cutting Ballast Off the Hot Air Balloon
And so that is, you know, some of the areas that we work with people on is to sort of identify that worst five, ten, 25%, whether it’s projects, products, services, customers, market segments, etc.
And in many cases by removing that from the business, it’s like cutting ballast off a hot air balloon and everything just shoots up and is more fun and easier and more profitable. And somewhat ironically, by cutting some things, sometimes it really can even unleash a lot of growth.
Behind the Scenes: 64 Consecutive Quarters at the Bank
Yeah. You know, that’s that’s a principle I learned in my early days in banking. Our bank was a highly profitable one of its kind. Even many of my listeners have heard me say this multiple times because it’s so unique.
The way we ran the bank, we accumulated 64 consecutive quarters of earnings growth. 16 years we were growing as an institution. And you plot bank trajectory over a 16 year period. There’s going to be booms and busts and market turns and the ups and downs and all that.
But yet we had that steady, reliable trajectory. And one of the ways we did that was the very thing you’re talking about. We had a massive internal system that calculated customer profitability.
Every customer that signed on with us had a profile of analysis that we did, whether they were a loan customer or a deposit customer. We had a way of calculating and measuring their contribution to our success, and it was based on a real simple premise. You know, you are the sum of your parts.
And to to your point, if you had a bunch of customers that had a negative Return. You’re eating your margin on those customers, and when you have a chance to work with that customer, to flip that script and do what you want to do to make it healthy for the the organization, if you manage down at that, call it project level, or in our case, customer level, you have a much clearer picture toward your end goal.
Dell’s Maniacal Focus on Margin Dollars
Yeah, I mean, I think you nailed it. And I mean that right there is such a great case study here.
We’ve got a bank that is highly focused on profitability. I won’t say more than revenue, I’m not sure, but a high focus on profitability. The way they’re doing it is they’re measuring, in your case, customers by profitability and then taking action to, I assume, unload or adjust, whether it’s, you know, pricing or services or whatever to non-profitable customers and then optimizing who’s your customer based on profitability.
And that is exactly the kind of stuff that we do to help folks. And that is what that’s going to what that’s what’s going to get you to 16 quarters of profit growth.
You know, when I used to work at Dell, and Dell was very fortunate because they had a very direct relationship with most of their customers. And so it allowed them to determine profitability by customer or profitability by order, because they were doing less like selling it through other channels. And things were adding a lot of intermediaries just made it harder to measure.
And they had a very maniacal focus. This was sort of the late 90s, early 2000, kind of a maniacal focus on what they called margin dollars, very similar to what you’re referring to, but they were optimizing most decisions on am I going to get kind of a, you know, an accounting parlance, something similar to contribution margin? and they were making their decisions based on that much more than they were making decisions based on revenue.
And that’s like the big disconnect when business owners or managers or executives are primarily thinking revenue, revenue, revenue versus profit or contribution margin or, you know, return to the business minus some kind of overhead. You know, then you can do well on revenue, but you might be giving back all your profit. Right.
Key Discussion Point 2: The Whale Account
That’s why I hear a lot. I see it a lot in sales systems. They have a box there for a long term value or lifetime value that they estimate on a relationship. And it’s it’s inevitably always the revenue number. Well, you know, this customer is going to pay his $10 million. So what. You know, it’s $10 million of what and what are you committed to?
and back to the entrepreneurial game. I have seen clients who, you know, founder owner opens the doors on a brand new business. They’re so excited about what they’re offering. It’s all great and good.
Inevitably, in every story there’s a whale account that comes along. You know, the the, the really big guy that says, you know, you know, I’m going to I’m going to take up 50% of your capacity and you go, yippee! And that’s exciting.
And it can be but dot, dot, dot, you’ve got to really pay attention to what you’re offering that whale. And I was guilty of it. In one of my ventures I got, I landed a whale account that ended up being about. At the time, it was about 35% of our total output was going to this one client.
But they kept calling and saying, hey, Doug, I need you to just do this one extra thing. I need you to try this, and I need you to do that. And you go, yeah, yeah.
Sharpen your pencil a little bit more.
Got it, got it, got it. And, and then eventually you start looking at that margin idea that, well, wait a minute, what is this customer really costing me versus what I’m getting in? The margin is going, you know, and there are volumes going up. And when it’s small or negative, you really never make it up in volume. Is the old adage.
Robert Kaplan and the Whale Curve
It sounds like you’re reading off my play sheet there, you know, and it’s fun that you use the word whale client.
There’s a fellow named Robert Kaplan, like an emeritus professor at Harvard and a Hall of Fame accountant. Just imagine those get togethers must be scintillating, right?
But anyway, he is well known for this thing called the whale curve, which is very closely aligned with what I described that $90 million construction manufacturing company where the first quarter highly profitable. The middle, you know, uncertain and the back end being very essentially negative.
But but when they dug in there even a little bit more. They found out that in many cases, a large chunk of volume would be soaked up by some of these whale clients. And the challenge is, is that often your biggest clients, they know it.
And, you know, it’s like they’re looking for price concessions or payment concessions or you need to do some different things. And then if you had the ability to really track like profitability, margins, contribution margin, net income by customer, you might not feel so great about that.
And in fact, again, citing Robert Kaplan, who essentially one of the inventors or biggest proponents of getting activity based costing out to the world would talk routinely about how most accounting reports, even in large like fortune 100 companies, were not effective in helping managers optimize for profitability.
Why Owners Manage to Revenue
And the reason I bring that up is in the mid-market space, midsize and small business. In many cases, there’s a big gap in accounting where they’re not matching costs. Hard costs and soft costs and revenue very well at all, let alone either by client, by product or by market segment.
And so what happens is it drives people to measure what they can manage, which is revenue. So they’re thinking revenue because they can often track revenue.
But if they’re not tracking cost effectively, hard costs and soft costs to those products, to those services, to those segments, to those customers, then they’re not able to get a handle on margin, contribution, margin, profitability. So then they’re just managing to revenue and then they’re they’re getting in trouble, you know. Yeah.
Key Discussion Point 3: Unit Cost Accounting
Well and to that point I’ll circle back to my bank analogy. That was one of the elements, one of the significant elements of our ability to calculate customer profitability. We had a very elaborate unit cost accounting discipline in the bank.
For every key service or operating function we offer to clients, things like making a deposit or cashing a check. We knew the unit cost of processing that transaction. And obviously we knew a particular number of those transactions were tied to your account.
So it was easy to break that down, aggregate it and apply that unit cost to your profitability profile. And when you do that, you, you you build this, this, this whole model of very accurate overhead, if you will, to you know what it’s taking to support that client relationship.
And I mean, it was a it was a very sophisticated system because when you get into the larger commercial relationships, you know, they’ve got a lot of subsidiary companies and entities and maybe even hundreds or if not thousands of bank accounts, literally. But our system knew how to deal with all that.
And we we broke it down. If our cheque processing area cleared 100,000 checks in the month, we knew where all of those went, which accounts they went to, we had that detail broken down and there was always a check and balance.
It was like, you know, okay, did we allocate 100,000 checks? Yeah, 100,000 was our grand total. Boom. We’re square and we could run the calculation for the customer profitability.
And now that is gross overkill for most entrepreneurial businesses, but there are certain elements that, you know, in a small, smaller business can break down. So let’s use your construction company example. How did you help them break down some of that structure on those applicable costs?
Per-Unit Economics on a Legal Pad
Yeah. Well, well first of all, I was just in love with your story. You know, this sort of per unit economics. I’d like to answer your question, but I’d like to slide in a little comment on these per unit economics.
You know, in many of the businesses I work with, I think, you know, 5 to 50 million in revenue, the the sophistication of their accounting sometimes isn’t great, right? And so they really are struggling, you know, let’s say they take a deposit, but then they do the work later or they do the work now.
They write an invoice and then they get paid later. Sometimes the costs and the revenue, they’re not really matching up either the same time period or the same customer. Let’s not get too deep into that.
But my point is, is sometimes looking at accounting reports doesn’t get it done for them easily to get an analysis or an assessment of what’s profitable.
However, one thing that can be very effective is almost like starting at a whiteboard. I wish I had a whiteboard here. I might bust out a legal pad, depending on how unsophisticated we could get. and do an example of per unit economics. I’m going to just try it here for fun.
I’m playing the game show background music as well.
So if you guys can see this, I just made the most simple chart. So let’s say this is either product one and or product A and product B. And then here you got your revenue which is usually pretty straightforward. And then we’re going to list our various types of cost. So let’s say it’s a product.
There’s three different material inputs. And then there’s like some manufacturing time and then there’s some labor. But then there’s going to be some soft cost to sell it like a, a commission or a delivery cost to invoice, etc..
And then when you, you, you kind of marry those two things up and then you get your profit at the end. I probably should have put that down there. I’m going to use the pi symbol for profit. But you can use just write profit. So like, you know, revenue minus cost you’re going to get your profit number.
Don’t Forget the Soft Costs
One thing I’ll just say is make sure to include your soft costs, invoicing, delivery, pick and pack sales costs. Not just the sales cost, but maybe the cost of sales that don’t turn into a sale, right?
If your sales people are effort or marketing or whatever, has to bring in 30 accounts into the top of the funnel to get one out the bottom, that that needs to somehow be factored in there. And I’ll just give you a specific example.
The Real Estate Brokerage Example
I was working with a real estate brokerage company, and let’s say there were three columns starter homes. Million dollar ish homes and $5 million homes. Right?
What they found is that while revenue on a percentage was very linear, I think they got like 3 or 6%, depending on if they had one or both sides of the transaction. They didn’t realize that for every home they were spending something like, I don’t know, $2,000 putting together a slick marketing package and a video. And I wouldn’t call it staging the home, but kind of tuning some stuff up.
And that made so much sense when that home was like $1 million or $5 million. But for starter homes, they had a flat cost, let’s call it 2500. But if you’re only getting 3% of a $300,000 home. You just gave back something like a third of your revenue for that.
And what they found is they were kind of losing money on the starter homes, doing pretty decent on the million dollar homes, and really, really profitable on the $5 million homes.
When You Are the Finance Team
And just to kind of wrap up this whole thing, this concept of per unit economics is something I would really invite everyone to kind of calculate for themselves.
And if you’re in more of a smaller to mid market company, often your accounting and finance reports like you don’t have, like when I used to work at Dell and Microsoft, there’s 30 people in the finance team supporting your division. You could get a lot of information right.
But if you’re a $5 million company and you’re the CEO, you’re the finance team, right? So you might not be able to pull that easily out of your accounting. But you can swag this right.
If you’re a construction, you know, contractor And you do you know, I don’t know. $50,000 renovations, $200,000 big ones and half million dollars. Like real big ones, you know, like, on average, what do those things look like?
You know, and what’s very nice is often you’ll find that if you either get out of the things you’re great at or start getting smaller and smaller, or go more budget projects, your your flat costs don’t get smaller, but your revenue does, which means your profit stinks on those now, not for everybody.
Walmart vs. Nordstrom
Some companies are really well suited for small projects or small orders, or budget conscious shoppers like Walmart makes money when you roll in and spend $5, right? But Nordstrom is not making money when you roll in and roll out of there for $5. Right.
And so it just depends on what you’re up to. But that per unit economics tool, very, very powerful as, like a shortcut to getting a handle on profitability. If you’re accounting and finance team doesn’t exist and reports aren’t that great. Right.
Right. Well, there are so many applications for this. And you’re right. Depending on the business, the nature of the business, your unit cost model is going to be different.
And what I say to most founders is and you’re right, if if you’re under 5 million, probably the founder is the finance department. And he may have a bookkeeping resource that’s part time doing something.
But when you think about analysis of the numbers, it’s on you as the founder to to think about that and, you know, breaking out beyond the that top side revenue tracking number, it’s like I’m sure there are those that are going to be listening to us that have had the experience.
They look at their company financials, they see this top side revenue gain, but they look at their bank account and it’s like, I don’t have any money in it. And there you go. That’s the first warning sign that you have these kinds of problems.
Key Discussion Point 4: Your Business Is a Leaky Bucket
Let me ask you this, Ben, when when you do engage with a new client, where do you start in your effort to help them?
Wow. We should have planned this, but thanks for tossing me up a big, fat softball. You might want to put it later in the show notes. It’s profit. LEKS. But we often think of. Don’t get me started with my little buckets. We’re going to get there in a minute. Maybe.
But I often think of a business as a bucket. And so revenue is coming in the top. And there are legitimate costs where if you will, water leaks out the side. You know, if you’re in construction and you’re building somebody a house, I mean, you must in fact use some lumber and some drywall and that like, makes total sense.
But then there’s also a lot of other, what I call profit leaks, where you could imagine water is dripping out the side of your bucket, so it becomes impossible for that bucket to retain a lot of water, which would be, you know, your your earnings or profitability or cash or sort of along that metaphor.
Find the Leaks, Then Patch the Worst Offenders
And so what I often invite people to do is, number one, identify those profit leaks, leaks detector, which you’re going to get to. And then I mean, heck, even if it’s duct tape over that leak, it’s better than nothing.
And what I see is people are usually I’ve got these buckets, which is their business with a bunch of holes in them, profit leaks, and they’re just trying to put more water in the bucket, but they’re not getting anywhere.
And so what we do is we help identify these leaks in the side of the bucket. And then we kind of identify the biggest, worst offenders. We try to patch those buckets so that those holes so that that bucket can kind of store more water.
And then it’s at that time we start saying, okay, now that your bucket isn’t so darn leaky, let’s either build a bigger bucket, put more water in it, etc. but it’s often kind of a fool’s errand to try to put more water in a bucket that has a hole in the bottom.
And so that’s where we try to start. We call it a profit leaks detector. That’s at that URL WW profit. It’s free. And then we send you some videos to just help you work through it. But a very powerful tool to go through it.
And you know, one of the things we talked about before was, you know, profit negative projects or profit negative customers are great examples of a leak in your bucket.
You know, as you were Describing that. Excuse me one second.
Key Discussion Point 5: Profit Is Not Cash Flow
As you were describing that, I couldn’t help but think about another parallel discipline in trying to run a business.
And that is understanding your cash flow. And to me, there’s a there’s a tight corollary. If you do a good job on mapping cash flow. And let me give you some simple examples of what I’m talking about.
Building a 12-Week Cash Flow Model
If you try to set up a 12 week cash flow model, you’re going to you’re likely going to have three occurrences on the first of the month of what rent for the building you’re in. If you’re leasing space from somebody. And so those are going to be three blocks along the way, you know, first and fifth and ninth or whatever column on your spreadsheet, you’re going to have payroll, maybe weekly or or bi weekly or monthly. However you’re set up and you got numbers that got to fall in there over that time period. You’re going to have bills like your insurance or your utilities or other, you know, basic recurring things.
And then you do get into your payables for your vendors. You know, if you if you get to buy materials on, you know, on term, they’re going to expect frequent payments against that account.
You know, so you’re going to budget those. Well guess what, folks. Those line items that you’re filling in that cash flow expense block. Those are elements that can be allocated to your unit cost for how you’re, you know, going to look at the overall profitability and things like rent.
You can you can decide. And that would I presume, be in your soft cost category in your model. Ben. But, you know, you can allocate that either based on the number of clients you’ve got or some weighted average of how big the client is. If you want to spread it that way, it starts getting a little sophisticated at that point.
But the point being is if, if, if, if you use the premise, everything goes somewhere you you can. That is the essential accuracy of unit cost accounting so that you get to that customer or project profitability idea.
Two Valleys of Death
Yeah. I mean, you covered a lot there. I don’t know that that that you’re hoping for me to comment. I think you just nailed later right out there.
But I do think that a 13 week cash flow forecast, you’re a banker or an ex banker. It sounds like I think that’s a pretty standard thing that if you’re expecting to get a loan or, you know, have a sophisticated conversation with anybody about your finances, you are going to want to have some kind of cash flow forecast.
I think what I would just pop in there is for, for, you know, if you’re an executive of a fortune 1000 company, in many cases cash flow is not an issue for you know.
Profit is. But boy, when you’re the owner of a seven and eight figure company, cash flow is a big freaking deal. And I just want to draw out a couple of distinctions here.
The first distinction is to to make to make a distinction between revenue and profitability. So just because you’re selling more stuff doesn’t mean you’re more profitable. So that is kind of like level one. And then there’s also and that should show up on your PNL. And so if your accounting is fairly tight it will show up there.
Sometimes if you have like a lot of terms like people pay late and they take them or you take deposits. You sometimes need a little bit of a bigger time period to capture all the costs and revenue, like a quarter or a month or a year versus a month, I guess.
But also very important to make a distinction between profit and loss and cash flow. And I think that is something that that you are alluding to that can really get people tripped up. You might be profitable, but you might suck at cash flow, right?
So let’s just pretend, you know, I bid jobs or I sell projects or services at 100 and my cost is 30. Like, wow, I’m pretty damn good margins. I should be quite profitable.
But if I, you know, if it takes me two months to deliver it and then three weeks to send out an invoice on 30 day terms, and then people pay late, I might be upside down on cash flow anyway. So even if my profitability is good, you know, people are taking so much longer to pay me versus when I put my, you know, costs in.
I could have a cash flow problem. Right. So very important for all your entrepreneurs out there. Just just think again. Number one distinction revenue versus profit. That’s the first valley of death. You want to get across that one, you know without falling off. And then the difference between profitability and cash flow can also be very very very very critical.
Behind the Scenes: The Truck Driver Who Started a Trucking Company
You raise a good distinction here. And it is a critical one that is is frankly hard for a lot of entrepreneurs to get their head around if they are coming into business from a non business viewpoint.
I did some work in my days after I left the frontline banking world. I did some consulting work for the FDIC and we were dealing with closed banks and banks that had failed and banks that had done a bad job of managing their their work.
And I think about there was a customer of one bank that I was working with who was a young man who drove commercial trucks, you know, 18 wheelers. And he rolled into the bank one day before it closed and told the chairman, I want to start a trucking company.
And the chairman said, great, we’ll make you these loans. And, you know, you can have three trucks and get started. There’s a big leap from being the driver behind the wheel to knowing what it takes to actually run a trucking company.
It’s a it’s it’s it’s a much greater leap than you might think. And this poor young man really didn’t have, you know, the wherewithal to figure that out. So the whole enterprise quickly collapsed.
And my point in saying that is there are some very strong, critical, basic understandings people need to have. If they’re thinking about going the entrepreneurial route, they they need to find a coach, an advisor, you know, and you can start with a CPA. They’ll help you figure a lot of this out in the very basic form that you might need to protect yourself.
But the idea of having an idea to sell a service or a product and get a certain price for that unit doesn’t make you a profitable business. I think that’s the bottom line to get across here, and it may sound very elemental to those who already understand it, but I think it’s an important one that a lot of entrepreneurs struggle to learn in, sometimes to their own demise.
Practical Advice: The Ten Slices of the Pie
Yeah. I mean, kind of the way I looked at it is let’s pretend that there’s ten different areas that your leadership team or your entrepreneur would need to master to be successful in their business. Let’s just say it’s setting a vision and planning, delivery, recruiting, finance. I mean, there’s a lot of different slices to the pie, if you will.
You know, it would be a very, very rare individual who’s a freaking genius at all ten of those. So it’s almost never the case.
And so, you know, almost everybody, if they if they end up, you know, having some millions of revenue and the business is, you know, going concern and doing fairly well, you know, they’re they’re likely really darn good at 2 or 3 of those things, you know, okay. Or having properly filled some slots on their team to get pretty good shape in like another, you know, three or 4 or 5 of those things.
But often what we see is that there’s 1 or 2 slices or 1 or 2 of those ten areas that are kind of lagging.
Right. And so let’s just pretend one of them is, you know, service delivery and quality. Well, over time that is going to erode, you know, their business, you know, customers are going to leave them and stuff like that.
An Education Gap, Not a Motivation Gap
But, you know, in many cases. You know that trucker example. Some of those clients, some of those business owners are some of my favorite because they they just didn’t get the memo on some of those slices, like the distinction between revenue and profit and profit and cash and maybe some of the things that go into that.
And so, you know, if you’re that trucker and now you’ve got a fleet of ten semis and you’re doing, you know, I don’t know, five, ten, $30 million a year in revenue, you know, you’re probably going great at a handful of those ten slices. Other ones are pretty buttoned up.
But if your profit is kind of crappy or your cash flow is crappy, it’s often because there’s some chunks that you’re just not that familiar with, and it’s a little bit more of a education gap rather than a a motivation gap or a willingness to embrace change or whatever.
And one of the reasons I like working with those clients the best is a little bit of additional like, diagnosis, prescription and training can really make a huge difference. Whereas people who already know the answer but aren’t taking the action, sometimes that’s a little trickier to fix, you know?
Absolutely.
So great, great, great, great story you had there.
Closing Thoughts
Well, Ben, on that note, I think we’re going to wrap this up. This has been a good one. Let me let you repeat those links you mentioned earlier. And we will have them in the show notes.
The Profit Leaks Detector
Perfect, perfect. It’s, www.profitdoctor.com/leaks. I think it even shows on the little video there. So profit doctor you can find me on LinkedIn and Instagram and all those things.
But that profit leakage detector really an effective tool. It lists what we would generally consider to be the ten worst offenders when it comes to profit leaks said differently.
The ten areas that, if you were to patch those up, are the most likely ten. To give you more bang for your buck. But that tool helps you narrow down from all ten you know, to which maybe one or 2 or 3 are really at work undermining your bottom line.
And so rather than trying to fix everything all at once, it’s like, what’s the worst offender? I’d probably invite you to start there.
And then it does include, like we email you a few videos so that, you know, you can really get it. Because sometimes looking at a one page sheet of instructions is, you know, not that easy to put together your kid’s bicycle. So having a how to video, you know, helps a lot of people.
Well, again, Ben, thank you for that information and sitting in with us today and sharing. And I think it’s been a great discussion. Really appreciate it.
My pleasure Doug, thank you so much.
Well, folks, this is part of the show.
I like to remind you, we do have a video version of this show, and in the video you’ll get to see that chart that Ben referred to. It is on YouTube channel by the same name. Leadership powered by common sense. Hop over there and join us on the channel if you will. Subscribe.
And we drop shows twice a week, so we’ve got a lot coming at you, a lot of good information if you need to get Hold of me. My website is simply Dougthorpe.com. We’d love to hear from you.
And I do offer a free diagnostic consultation about your business or your leadership situation. We’d love to hear from you and talk about that. But for now, we’re going to wrap this thing up. Sign off. Say goodbye. Go out there. Make it a great day.
You’ve been listening to leadership powered by common sense. Hosted by Doug Thorpe. If you would like to know more about the coaching and advisory services he provides, visit Doug Thorpe.
Meet Our Guest
Ben Hansen – Ben’s career has taken him from the Fortune 100 world at Dell and Microsoft to becoming a 5-time Inc. 5000 entrepreneur and building an eight-figure staffing company with a team of more than 100 employees. Through that experience, he learned that the best leaders don’t rely on complicated strategies; they make disciplined, common-sense decisions that consistently move the business forward.
Today, as the founder of Profit Doctor, Ben helps leadership teams at $2M–$50M owner-led companies solve what he calls “Profititis” – when revenue grows but profitability doesn’t. His practical, field-tested approach helps leaders eliminate hidden profit leaks, improve cash flow, and make better decisions that strengthen both their teams and their businesses.
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