Here’s a confession: for years I thought running a my brand consultancy about heroic effort. If I just worked harder, pitched harder, wrote smarter decks, worked longer nights, became a better strategist, eventually the universe would reward me with… what? Clients lining up at the door? Profit margins that didn’t look like they’d been mugged in a dark alley?
Nope. Those things are not the result of just working harder. Instead, they are the result of knowing exactly what to focus on, and making even small incremental improvements that compound into exponential growth.
Want a new superpower?
Learn the math of your business.
Yes, the math.
Yep. The one subject most of us avoided in school is the thing that secretly runs our agencies, consultancies, and studios. You don’t need a Harvard case study. You just need to understand that every business—no matter how glamorous the work looks on Instagram—comes down to what I call The Money Equation™.
It looks like this:
Profit = (Leads × Conversion Rate × Average Transaction Value × Retention Rate) × Margin – Operating Expenses
Now, if your eyes glazed over just there, stay with me. This isn’t algebra. This is a really simple.
How The Money Equation Works
In plain speak, your business results (revenue and profit) are directly linked to the following six factors of The Money Equation™.
1. How many leads are you generating?
2. How many of your leads are you converting?
= Nr. of Clients
3. How much do clients they pay, on average, when they buy?
4. How many times do they buy per year? (what is the total spend per year)
5. What is your margin (e.g. average margin)
6. What are your operating expenses (fixed costs of running the business)
= Profit.
Everything you do should be directly linked to these results.
Unless every person on your team contributes to some of these numbers, ask yourself, what are you paying them for?
Sure, business is about more than money. But money is the oxygen that keeps you in business. When money runs out, a business dies.
Every frustration you have about your business lives in this equation. Too few leads? You already know that pain. Conversion rate tanking? That’s every pitch you thought was “in the bag” until procurement shredded it. Thin margins? Hello, bloated overhead. Clients who ghost you after one project? Retention.
Here’s the fun part: you don’t have to fix everything at once. In fact, you shouldn’t. If you improve each of these levers by just 10%, your profits don’t grow by 10%—they can almost double. That’s the magic of compounding.
Take one small agency I worked with.
They were closing about 1 in 5 proposals (20%), averaging $25K per project, and scraping by on single-digit net margins. They thought the answer was “more leads.” Instead, we zoomed in on their conversion rate.
By tightening proposals, clarifying outcomes, and training the founder to sell benefits instead of scope minutiae, they moved the close rate from 20% to 30%. Nothing dramatic—just a 10% bump. But here’s what happened: same number of leads, but suddenly they were winning half again as many deals. Combined with slightly firmer pricing, profit doubled in under a year.
That’s the Money Equation in action. Small tweaks. Exponential impact.
I have identified and documented more than 100 (yes!) ways to make improvements to The Money Equation.
Take leads, for example. You might only rely on what I call "random referrals", i.e. referrals that come without your control.
But there are so many more ways to generate leads, from organic content to paid ads, partnerships, press, referral programs, you name it. In fact these are main categories only.
But here’s why most creative firms miss it: we’re addicted to the shiny stuff. We chase new channels, new service lines, new AI tools (yes, guilty). Meanwhile, the real power is hiding in plain sight: the six dials already sitting on your dashboard.
Pouring more leads into a broken funnel? That’s like trying to fix a leaky roof by buying a bigger bucket. Margins too thin? More clients will just accelerate your race to the bottom. Retention weak? Congrats, you’ve just bought yourself the world’s most exhausting treadmill.
The Money Equation is a sobriety test for your business. It forces you to face the unsexy truth: growth comes from fixing the leaks, not buying more buckets.
And once you start using it, everything changes. Suddenly, you know where to focus. You stop trying to boil the ocean. You make small, deliberate changes—tighter proposals, sharper pricing, clearer scope, fewer expenses—and the numbers begin to work in your favor.
It’s not magic. It’s math.
But in an industry that thrives on chaos, clarity itself feels like a miracle.
So here’s my challenge: look at your six levers. Find the weakest one. Fix it. Then move to the next. Rinse and repeat.
Do that, and you’ll discover what I did: growth doesn’t have to feel like chaos. It can actually feel like control.
And once you feel that? You might just fall back in love with your business again.
Wanna dive a bit deeper and hear me explain it? In this video, I share how it works, and how it all ties into your core operating system - the three main "cogs" that makes everything in your business flow (or stall).
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