I've been on both sides of broke. I know where the money hides.
Hey its Will,
I was playing golf a couple of years ago with a few guys I'd never met. Random pairing on a Tuesday tee time. Nobody knew anybody.
Somewhere around the fifth hole, two of them started talking about their business. Not complaining — more like thinking out loud, the way builders do when they're stuck and don't know who else to ask. Manufacturing company in the Midwest. Good clients. Long relationships. The kind of book most would trade their best year for.
But their margins were shrinking. Had been for three years. Revenue kept going up, and profit kept going down, and they couldn't figure out why.
More revenue. Less profit. The classic trap.
I didn't say anything. Just listened. When you've been doing this as long as I have, you learn more by keeping your mouth shut on the front nine than most consultants learn in a six-week engagement.
By the back nine, I had a pretty good picture.
After the round, they invited me to lunch. Clubhouse grill, plastic menus, iced tea refills. And I couldn't help myself — I asked them to walk me through their customer base. Not the big picture. The specifics. Who's paying what? Who takes the most of their time? Where the actual margin lives after they account for hand-holding, rework, slow payers, and accounts that chew up their best people for the lowest return.
They'd never done it. Not once.
They knew their total revenue. They knew their total costs. But they had never sat down to look at which clients were actually making them money and which were quietly eating them alive.
Here's what most business builders don't know — or know but have never checked: roughly 80% of your profit almost always comes from about 20% of your customers. That's not a theory. It's a pattern I've seen in manufacturing, services, consulting, contracting, and tech. Across every industry I've touched in 50 years. The ratio holds.
If you've never run that math on your own business, there is money hiding in your customer base right now that you don't know about. See how it works.
These two were spreading themselves across dozens of accounts, giving the same time, energy, and attention to clients who barely moved the needle as they did to those carrying the entire business.
One client — their third-largest by revenue — was actually costing them money once you factored in rework, scope creep, and 90-day payment terms. They were paying their own team to lose money on that account. And they had no idea, because the invoice amount looked healthy.
Their best customers were subsidizing their worst ones. They'd been doing it for years.
Revenue is the most dangerous number in business. It hides everything. When it's going up, you stop looking underneath. You assume the engine is healthy because the car is moving forward. But a car can run on a cracked engine block for a long time before it seizes on the highway. By then, the repair costs are ten times what a diagnostic would have cost.
I told them: forget the big strategy conversation. Forget the market. Forget overhead. Start with the 20% that's actually making you money. Know who they are by name. Know what they pay, what they cost you to serve, and what's left over after everything — the real number, not the invoice number. Then build everything around that foundation. And the client that's costing you money? Have the conversation or let them go. Either way, you're richer tomorrow than you are today.
It took one lunch. Napkin stuff. Nothing fancy. They found roughly $200K in annual margin they were giving away to accounts that didn't earn it. Not by cutting costs. Not by raising prices. Just by seeing which clients were gold and which ones were gravel, and making decisions accordingly.
$200K. Sitting right there the whole time. Hidden behind a revenue number that looked fine.
That's the kind of thing hiding in your business right now. Not because you're doing anything wrong — but because you've never had someone sit across the table and ask the questions that make the invisible visible. That's what I do. Same questions I'd ask at that lunch table. Blind spots. Gaps. Stuck money. Check it out!
I never saw those guys again. Don't even remember their names. But I think about that lunch sometimes. Two builders sitting on a gold mine, frustrated because they couldn't find gold, and the only reason was that nobody had ever told them to stop digging everywhere and start digging where the vein actually was.
That's what I do. I walk into the room — or in this case, I sat down at a clubhouse table with a plastic menu and a glass of iced tea — and I see the thing everybody else walks past.
It's almost never complicated. It's almost always right there. You just can't see it from where you're standing.
Remember - Think Bigger, Play Smarter, Win More!
— Will
P.S. You don't need a $5,000 a month consultant to find where your profit is hiding. You need someone who's looked at a bunch of businesses and can spot the gaps in yours. If you want me to work with you personally, apply here.
