Free guide · Two-minute read
The seven numbers every owner should know.
All seven are below — read them in two minutes. Add your email and the full written guide comes over as well, yours to keep.
These are the seven we check first, after about eight years reading owners’ numbers inside CBA and NAB.
Every owner can name their revenue. Most can name their profit. After that it gets vague — and vague is where a business quietly leaks. A margin point that went missing. Cash that lands sixty days after the work is done. One customer carrying a third of the revenue.
Seven numbers cover it. Here’s what each one is, and what it’s telling you. Nothing here needs a spreadsheet open.
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Revenue growth
How much bigger the top line is than a year ago, as a percentage. Growth covers a lot of sins — when it flattens, everything else on this list stops hiding.
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Gross margin
What’s left of every sales dollar after the direct cost of delivering it. It moves first — a supplier’s price rise, a discount you got used to giving, a job that takes longer than it used to.
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Net profit
What’s left once everything is paid, including you. Revenue is the number you say out loud; this is the one that decides what the business can do next.
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Cash runway
How many months you could keep paying the bills on the cash you have today, if money stopped coming in. Profitable businesses run out of cash all the time. This is how much room you have to be wrong.
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Cash conversion
The gap between paying for the work and getting paid for it. Stretch that gap and growth starts costing you money — every new job funds itself out of your account first.
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Customer concentration
How much of your revenue comes from your biggest few customers. It reads as a strong relationship right up until one of them leaves — then it reads as the whole problem.
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Your own return
What the business actually pays you for owning and running it — wages, profits, the lot — against the money and years you have in it. Owners work this one out last. It’s the one the whole thing is for.
These are measurements, not advice. What to do about any of them depends on your business.
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The seven numbers tell you where you stand. The Seven Score tells you where the plan is thin: your business against the seven disciplines, in three minutes, no preparation needed.
More than about $3M in revenue?
You’ve just read them, and they still apply. But past that size the question stops being “what’s my gross margin” and starts being “what do I do about it”: growth, structure, succession, the exit nobody has planned yet. That’s a conversation, not a guide.
One client engagement at that end: $22M → $32M in revenue, with +$4M in net profit. The case studies have the detail.
Thirty minutes, one meeting, no deck. Jack reads and answers every enquiry himself, within one business day.
On anything regulated: we architect the strategy and coordinate your registered tax adviser / accountant / lawyer to implement it.