Your number

The money for your next order is already in your business.

The sales number went up. The bank balance did not.

You know how there are those state websites, where you can type in your own name and find out there is money sitting there that has been owed to you for years? Maybe it's an old paycheck. Maybe it's a deposit you forgot about. It's your money. You earned it. It has just been sitting there the whole time, because nobody ever told you it was there and you never went and asked for it.

Your business has one of those.

Find yours

Six minutes. Four questions for each place. Nothing to look up.

And before I show you where it is, I want to tell you what it's for.

Because that's the part that matters.

It's the next order, the one you were about to put half of on a card. It's the product you've been pushing to next year, every year, for three years now. It's the person you keep meaning to hire and keep not hiring. And sometimes it's just more that you get to bring home.

There are five places where the money gets left, and every one of them has a name. I'm going to give you all five, and then you're going to tell me which one is yours.

This is for you if you're a founder who makes and sells a physical product, somewhere between a quarter million and five million a year, on things that do not spoil and do not get eaten. If you're not there yet, I'm rooting for you, and this isn't your step yet.

My name is Nathan Erznoznik.

I ran a consumer brand for fourteen years. It took all fourteen of those years to get it from four million dollars to ten. Then, in the next three, it went from ten to thirty. Fourteen years to add six million. Three years to add twenty. The whole business tripled. Same company, same product, same me.

And I want you to hear what isn't in that story. I didn't launch a new product line to get that. I didn't go raise money. I didn't spend more on advertising. Fourteen years in, I stopped guessing, and I went and learned what I was supposed to have been looking at the whole time.

And I'm doing it again right now, in a brand a fraction of that size, with my own money on the line this year. The five places don't care how big you are. There's just less to sort through.

Nobody ever handed you the questions you were supposed to be asking.

Now I want to be careful with how I say this next part. Because this isn't about you doing something wrong, and it isn't about me being smarter than you. This is about something that nobody ever taught either one of us.

Somebody on your team might already watch one of these five. Almost nobody watches all five together. And it isn't because you don't care about your own money. Of course you care. It's because nobody ever sat you down and told you what to look at, across the whole business, on one page.

So here they are. And while you read them, I want you asking yourself one question. Which one of these is mine?

• One. The almosts. The people who came right up to the edge of buying from you and stopped. It's the person who filled a cart on your site at eleven at night and closed the tab. And it's the shop that asked you for a price list last spring and never sent an order. They found you. You did not have to go find them. Something stopped them, and nobody ever went back to find out what.
• Two. The second item. The size of one order. Somebody puts one thing in the cart and checks out, and nobody ever offered him the second thing, the thing that goes perfectly with what he was already buying. And this isn't just your website. It's the add-on nobody offers. It's the set nobody built. It's the dealer stocking two of your items when he could be stocking six.
• Three. The reorder that never came. Anybody who already paid you once and isn't paying you now. He bought it, he liked it, and nobody ever asked him to buy again. And on the shop side, it's the shop that used to order from you every eight weeks and now orders every twenty. Nobody catches that one, because the year total still went up, so it never showed up anywhere as bad news.
• Four. The donation. The money you give away without knowing it when certain products sell. Your costs did not all go up on the same day. Freight went up. Then the import tax. Then your factory raised the price on one piece. Then the box. Four different invoices, weeks apart, from four different companies, and not one of those people knew what the other three had already charged you. So over about a year your costs went up four or five times, and your price went up zero times.
• Five. The money that never made it to the bank. Money already tied up in your business that never made it to the bank. It starts with the shelf out back, the stock that should have sold last year, still sitting there. That's you being your own bank. And then there are the big accounts. You ship the goods, you send the invoice, and what comes back is less than what you billed. Nobody ever chased the difference, so it just became normal.

That's the whole map. Five places, in that order, every time. And I'd bet one of them raised its hand while I was talking. Hold on to that one.

And here's the part that changes how you look at this list.

These five don't just add up. Four of them multiply.

Let me show you with easy numbers. And I'm making these up so the math is simple to follow. This is not a promise about your business. Say twenty percent more of the almosts finish buying. Say the second item makes each order twenty percent bigger. Say your buyers come back twenty percent more often. And say correcting your pricing means the average selling price per item goes up twenty percent.

Four twenties. Most people hear that and think eighty percent. It isn't eighty. Because they don't add. Each one makes the others worth more. Stack those four twenties on top of each other and it comes out at about a hundred and seven percent. More than double.

And place five is different. It doesn't multiply. It adds on top, because that money is already tied up somewhere in the business.

And by the way, in the brand I run today, just the messages that send themselves, one corner of two of these places, turned out to be about thirty percent of what the store sells. One corner. Two places. Out of five.

And I'll tell you why nobody on your team has handed you this.

It's not because they're not good. Your books are good at showing you what happened. This money is in what didn't happen. The sale that stopped. The second item nobody offered. The reorder that never came. The price that never changed. And the money that never reached the bank.

In most businesses, nobody has the job of looking across all five for what isn't there.

So here's what to do about it. There's no score, and nobody grades you. Your answers show you which of the five deserves the closest look first. Most owners answer not yet to more of the twenty than they expected to. That's the normal result. It was mine too, the first time somebody walked me through it.

And if you're thinking, I don't have time for another project. This isn't a project. It's six minutes, tonight, at your own desk.