Your number
Most product brands are sitting on money they already earned and never collected.
Five places in a product business hold it. Six minutes and twenty questions tell you which one is yours.
Find your numberPrefer paper? Print the sheet
Free. Six minutes. Nothing to look up, and nobody calls you.
What it's for
The money has a job before it has a name.
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.
That's the part that matters. The number comes second.
The five places
Five places hold it.
Every one of them has a name. Read all five, and ask yourself one question while you do. Which one of these is mine?
1.A cart gets left at eleven at night.
Somebody filled a cart on your site and closed the tab. They found you, and something stopped them, and nobody went back to ask what.
What usually turns up: the one message the platform sends by itself is on, it is the only one, and nobody can say how many carts get left in a month. Some of those people were one reminder away from paying.
2.The second thing never went in the box.
Somebody put one item in the cart and checked out. Nobody offered the thing that goes with it, and the same is true of the dealer who carries two of your items when he could carry six.
What usually turns up: an order that went out with one thing in the box, to a buyer who would have taken two. And a dealer who has carried two of your twelve items for six years, because nobody ever showed him the other ten.
3.A buyer bought once and was never asked again.
He paid you, he liked it, and nobody asked him to buy again. On the shop side, it's the account that used to order every eight weeks and now orders every twenty, and the year total still went up, so nobody caught it.
What usually turns up: three or four steady accounts that went quiet months ago, and nobody noticed because the big ones kept ordering.
4.The price list has not moved while four invoices did.
Freight went up, then the import tax, then one piece from the factory, then the box. Four invoices, weeks apart, from four companies, and your price went up zero times.
What usually turns up: a best seller priced three years ago with this year's freight inside it, keeping less than the item nobody talks about.
5.The money never made it to the bank.
It starts with the shelf out back, the stock that should have sold last year and is still sitting there. And then there are the big accounts that pay less than you billed, and nobody chased the difference, so it became normal.
What usually turns up: a shelf out back nobody has added up at cost since the year it was made, and a deposit that came in smaller than the invoice and got posted anyway.
That's the whole map. And by the way, one of them probably raised its hand while you were reading. Hold on to that one.
What you get at the end
You get four things back.
- 1.The place your answers point at, next to the one you guessed.
- 2.Your number in dollars, off three sliders that stay on your phone.
- 3.One thing to do in each open place this week, at your own desk, nobody hired.
- 4.A page you can print.
There's no score. Nobody grades you. And there's no email to get your answers. They're yours the moment you finish.
And by the way, if you'd rather go through it together, there's a free thirty-minute sit-down at the end. That's here, whenever you're ready.
Who it's for
This is for 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.
Who wrote it
My name is Nathan Erznoznik.
I ran a consumer brand for fourteen years, and it took all fourteen to get it from four million dollars to ten. In the next three, it went from ten to thirty. 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.
Your number
Which one is yours?
Six minutes. Twenty questions. Nothing to look up, and nobody calls you.
Find your numberPrefer paper? Print the sheet
Your number · ThriveWorks360
