You've Already Earned the Money. It's Just Not in the Bank.

There's a moment in my conversation with Doug C. Brown where he describes sitting with a plumbing company that had just closed seven new jobs. They were thrilled. Money on the board.

Doug looked at their acquisition cost, their marketing spend, the drive time in and out of each location, the credit card fees. Then he told them they were losing $224 on every job.

They argued with him. Of course they did — the revenue was right there in front of them. Five minutes later they were quiet.

That gap between the number you're celebrating and the money you actually keep is what Doug does for a living. He's spent thirty-three years finding profit inside companies that had already paid for it and never collected. In his words, he's still looking for the first company where he couldn't find any.

Revenue growth is the flashy thing

Doug's observation is nearly universal: companies treat revenue growth as the answer to every problem. "We did eighty-two million" is a sentence people enjoy saying. It sounds like health.

But he once asked a client what their margins were, and got the same answer three times: we sell over a billion dollars.When he finally asked how much they were losing, the answer was $72 million a year.

Here's the arithmetic that should make anyone running a sales organization sit up. If your company operates at 4% EBITDA and you can move it to 20%, that's a 5X on the bottom line. Which means you could sell half of what you're selling now and end up in a better position than you're in today.

That's not an argument against growth. Doug is emphatically not telling anyone to stop growing. It's an argument for paying attention to how you're growing while you grow.

Where the money actually hides

Doug's diagnostic runs on 21 EBITDA drivers, each with five or six sub-points underneath. He starts with a fifteen-minute conversation, picks the one or two drivers that match what the client is trying to do, and shows them a before-and-after inside that first call.

The results he described aren't marginal. A $2.4 million HVAC company went to $4.96 million, with EBITDA moving from 13.1% to 28%. About a million dollars in additional operating cash. But the number that stayed with me was the valuation: up $7 million. Same company. Different discipline.

At the other end of the scale, a $772,000 plumbing shop whose owner couldn't pay himself. Two hours of review turned up $226,000 in unclaimed EBITDA. Forty thousand of it was back in the business within three weeks.

What's striking is how ordinary the leaks are. Underpricing. Proposals that never got sent. Proposals that got sent and never got followed up. Wrong-fit buyers. And, over and over, complexity.

Complexity is a profit leak

I told Doug about a manufacturer I worked with as a fractional CRO — under $10 million in revenue, well over a thousand SKUs, when maybe half a dozen products with options accounted for nearly all the volume. They also had customers buying onesie-twosies at the same discount as customers buying $100,000 at a clip, purely because of historical precedent and old friendships.

Doug had just seen the identical pattern at a software company. His point: when salespeople have too many choices, they get confused. And so do buyers.

He brought up Friendly's, which anyone from New England will recognize. As a kid he'd stand in front of 125 flavors and freeze. He came back from the military and they'd cut it to around twenty. Suddenly ordering was easy.

Sears understood this decades ago with good, better, best. Car dealers still run it. Three choices, and most people land in the middle.

Complexity shows up in process, too. Doug found a trades company taking eight weeks to install something that should take one. Customers were bailing — if you want air conditioning in July, September is not an acceptable answer. Fixing it took a couple of days. The bleed stopped. But every customer who walked had already been paid for.

The double edge of customer-centric

This is where the conversation turned, and where it connects to everything I believe about selling.

Wanting to serve customers well is right. But Doug pointed out how easily it curdles: unbilled change orders, scope creep, endless options offered in the name of choice that leave the buyer paralyzed. Sometimes, he said, the customer doesn't want to be loved that much.

The distinction I'd draw is between serving the customer's outcome and serving their every request. Those are not the same thing, and confusing them costs you money while doing the buyer no favors either.

Two ROIs, one deal

Doug told a story I keep thinking about. A realtor, a $4 million house, a wife selling it hard to her hesitant husband — she even offered to go back to the law firm part-time and cover the mortgage herself.

Then the realtor said: this is a big decision, why don't you take a few days and think about it.

They bought a different house the following week. On the next street over. For $5.2 million. Somebody else earned $104,000.

She lost it because she was only listening to one side of the conversation. There's the business case — the return on the money. And there's the personal one: how this looks, whether I'm safe, whether I'm going to regret this. In corporate selling it's almost never the buyer's own money, which makes the personal ROI more important, not less. Job stability. Political exposure. How they'll look if it goes sideways.

Miss that, and you don't just fail to close. You repel people.

Start before you're ready

Doug's advice on execution is refreshingly unglamorous: get it functional, make some money, then make it better. He has a client relaunching a product line who sold $14,000 in the first week to three customers. Not much money. Enormous information.

Tom Peters was saying a version of this in the early nineties — just do something. Doug's version involves a newborn: you can read every book, and you'll still learn more in the first night home than in nine months of preparation.

Perfection, as he put it, is the enemy of forward motion.

None of this is about extracting more from customers. It's the opposite. A business with 4% margins is a business that can't afford to invest in serving anyone well. Fix the leaks, and you buy yourself the room to actually do the work right.

Listen to the full conversation with Doug C. Brown on Thoughts on Selling. Find Doug at ceosalesstrategies.com.