At $10,000,000 to $50,000,000, a business will often stabilize and achieve predictable growth.

For each year, divide the net income (profit) number by the total sales/revenue number.* Then come up with the average. This is how you find the profit percentage for any public company. Do this for each of the five public companies you look at, and you will find the overall industry profit average. Use that overall industry profit average as your

the last three to five years and determine your most profitable year—based on percentages, not on dollar amounts.

humans are not logical. We are emotional beasts with monkey brains. We like shiny objects; we stuff ourselves when there’s free pizza; we buy twelve pounds of cat food just because it’s on sale, even though we don’t have a cat.

To grow the biggest and the fastest, you need to be the best at one thing you do. And to become the best at something, you need to first determine what you are best at and do it a whole lot better. To get there, you take your profit first and the answers to being the best at something will reveal themselves.

mark the expense with a P for any expense that directly generates (P)rofit; R for any expense that while necessary, can be (R)eplaced with a less expensive alternative; or U for any expense that is (U)necessary for delivering your offering.

Without enough money, we cannot take our message, our products, or our services to the world. Without enough money, we are slaves to the businesses we launched.

But pain just gets you to take enough action to get out of immediate pain. Then it stops working.

The perfect size for your business? It will happen naturally, when you take your profit first. You will reverse engineer all the elements of your business, and as Fried says, “the right size will find you.”