Why Revenue Is Just a Vanity Metric

You’ve seen the screenshots—the ones gurus love to post of their Stripe accounts.

Big numbers.

Lots of commas.

But here’s the question no one’s asking: how much of that did they keep?

In April 2022, my business did $185,000 in revenue for the month. 

On paper, I was crushing it.

Behind the scenes? Not so much.

I had:

• A sales manager.

• Multiple reps, setters, and account executives.

• An operations manager.

• 12 virtual assistants.

And after all of that, I only paid myself $10,000 before taxes for the month.

Now, I’m Canadian, so that $10K turned into about $5,500 after taxes.

And I was working 80–100 hours a week, 7 days a week.

Let’s do the math. That’s about $17 an hour. In Ontario, minimum wage is $17.20.

There I was, the CEO of a multimillion-dollar business making less than minimum wage.

Ew.

I missed so much that year:

• Cuddles with my kids.

• Dates with my husband.

• Visits with my aging parents.

And while I’d love to say I had a “lightbulb moment” that month and turned it all around... I didn’t.

I worked even harder, only to watch profits dip further.

It wasn’t until the end of 2022 that I made the shift: a profit-first mindset.

I rebuilt the business from the ground up with a roadmap that got us to 80% profit margins.

And tomorrow, I’ll share the exact plan we’re using to hit $200K/month in profit by December 2025.

But today, we’re doing something just as exciting:

We’re getting ready to reopen intake for our Cash Architect community, where we help business owners like you add $1M in ARR in 2025—starting at just $200/week.

We’re not opening yet, but if you’d like to get on the waitlist, reply “1 Mil” to this email, and the team will send you the details.

Spots fill quickly, so hand-raisers will get priority when intake officially opens.

P.S. Tomorrow, the team is going live for the $10M Swipe File Workshop. If you bought a ticket or you’re in our Cash Architect community, we’ll see you there. It’s going to be a good one!

-Kara