If your offers aren’t as profitable as you hoped, this episode shows you what to do next. A business profitability analysis starts with knowing what makes you the most money and what makes you the least, and Jennifer explains how to build from there toward the one offer where what your business does well meets what your customers will pay for.
Jennifer calls that overlap the sweet spot, and she walks through it as a Venn diagram: your business and its strengths in one circle, the result your customers are paying for in the other. From that result, you work backward to the roles, the strengths each role needs, and the measure of success for each one. That is how a founder gets out of the weeds and stops covering the gaps personally, which she calls the founder subsidy.
A business can show a profit and hold cash in the bank while the founder is paid nothing for the work they do. Jennifer points out that the real measure is whether you’re paying yourself what you’d have to pay an unrelated third party to do everything you do inside the business. If you aren’t, the profit is a subsidy, and it shows up when you try to sell, because the next owner doesn’t want to spend their life in your role.
What's covered:
What a buyer sees when a business only works because you do
How to find the sweet spot between what your business does well and what your customers are paying for
How to build roles from the customer’s result, including the measure of success for each role
How loyalty to the people already on your team can quietly shape your offers, and why the roles should come from the most profitable offer
What to do when the sweet spot doesn’t exist yet and you need a different offer or different customers
If you can’t say which offer earns the most and which earns the least, that gets fixed first, and Jennifer's business performance analysis is built to answer this. From there, look at which tasks and processes no longer serve what the customer pays for, and cut them. For anyone asking how to make your business more profitable, her answer is to build the offer around the customer’s result and then staff it with the right roles.
“You have to create the roles based on the offer that’s most profitable inside of your business.”
If you’re the one still covering every gap, or the numbers keep coming back lower than they should, this episode gives you a place to begin.
If you want help finding the sweet spot in your business, book a 90-minute strategy session with Jennifer. It’s available only to podcast listeners and YouTube viewers.