In this solo episode of the Above the Business podcast, host Bradley Hamner introduces the concept of “Point A,” a framework for rigorously assessing a business’s current state before plotting a growth roadmap (Point B). Drawing inspiration from Keith Cunningham’s The Road Less Stupid, Hamner emphasizes that a superficial, high‑level view of a company is insufficient; instead, entrepreneurs need a detailed, numbers‑driven picture. He walks listeners through a suite of financial, marketing, operational, and sales metrics that together form a comprehensive Point A snapshot: monthly run‑rate, multi‑year revenue trends, profitability, the Rule of 40 (growth + profitability ≥ 40), marketing spend, cost‑per‑lead, customer acquisition cost (CAC), lead‑to‑customer ratio, average customer value, revenue per full‑time equivalent (FTE), culture and team structure, sales pipeline size, lead conversion cycle, and total sales count. Hamner illustrates each metric with real‑world client examples—companies ranging from $2.4 M to $7 M in revenue aiming for $10 M—showing how understanding these drivers reveals the realistic levers needed for scaling. He also shares personal anecdotes about discovering his own blind spots, underscoring that many founders simply don’t know these numbers. The episode concludes with a practical “starter kit” of the most essential metrics to collect first, an invitation to a deeper dive via a BlueprintOS web class, and a motivational call to action for listeners to become true CEOs by mastering their numbers.
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Hey everyone, in today's episode of the Above the Business podcast, I want to talk about the importance of Point A, understanding exactly where your business is today. And then next week I'm going to talk about what I call Point B, where do you want your business to go. I first heard this language from my very favorite business book and that is The Road Less Stupid written by Keith Cunningham. Sidebar, by the way, if you've not read that book, absolutely pick it up. It's the GOAT of business books for sure. It influenced me so much around thinking time and just so many other things around language. And, um, it is just absolutely the book that I've read the most number of times and can't recommend it enough. We've tried I have tried so hard to get Keith to come on the podcast. Hopefully we'll be able to do that one day. He is actually the rich dad in the book Rich Dad Poor Dad written by Robert Kiyosaki. Anyway, I digress. This idea of point A, that language, point A, point B, was— that was the first time that I had picked that up, first place that I picked that up. And so I want to talk though about the importance and really the depth and nuance of really understanding where your business is today. Now, it can be really easy to give this lip service and in 5 minutes to be able to share, you know, where the business is today. Let me do my very best over the next 5 to 10 minutes or so to try to express to you the level of detail and how important it is to really have a good understanding and grasp about really where your business is today. And what I'm hopefully going to do is share with you some examples of what that looks like to be able to understand where is your business point A. Because if you're going to ultimately build what we'll talk about later in the upcoming weeks, uh, building a roadmap for your business, it first starts here, and that is in point A. Okay, some of the first places to be able to start is understanding your financials. Obviously, if you're an insurance agency owner, Club Capital can be able to help you to be able to understand that. What was— what's your monthly run rate from a revenue perspective? Are you doing $20,000 a month, 40,000 a month, 80,000 a month, 150,000 a month. Understanding your monthly run rate is incredibly important. What was last year's revenue? What do you project this year to be? But more importantly, what was the last year, last 2 years, last 3 years? What has the last 3 years looked like from an annual revenue perspective? Obviously, next to that is gonna be your profitability. Understanding the profitability numbers each one of those years. We use a, uh, rule called the Rule of 40, and it is looking at your year-over-year growth rate plus your profitability percentage. We want that number to be 40 or above. And you look back— if you can go back more years, I think it gives great insight— but also looking forward years is incredibly helpful as well. So you look at your year-over-year growth. How much is my top-line revenue growing year over year, and I want to add that to my profitability percentage. So you may look at maybe a 20% profitability and you're growing 20% year over year, or maybe you're wanting to grow a little faster, maybe you want to grow 30, 35%, but yet to do that the profitability ends up being 10 or 15%. Whatever your numbers ends up being, having historical numbers and where— what it was last year is unbelievably helpful. Again, in a future episode, I'll talk about point B, and that is kind of looking at what it is I want the business to do, and that includes with your financials. But there's way more than that. What about your marketing percentage? How much are you spending in marketing? What about your cost per lead? How much does it cost you to get a lead? If I keep going further, how much is your customer acquisition cost, often called, called your CAC? How much does it cost you to acquire a customer? What is your lead-to-customer ratio? What about your average customer value? What's the average customer value worth? What is your current value of all the customers that you have, whether it's 50, 1,000, 5,000 customers? What's an average customer pay you? If you're in insurance, was it pay you in premium? But also What does it pay you in actual annual commissions, annual revenue to the actual business? What about your culture? How would you actually describe your culture? Tell me about your team structure. In fact, I would love to know what's your revenue per person. You take your annual revenue and divide it by what's called your full-time equivalents or FTEs. That helps you to get an average number. An ideal, incredible number would be $250,000. The average number of the time that I've done this with our clients has worked out to be somewhere between $115,000 and $125,000. Now, that's just a good number and good perspective to have. I encourage you to run your numbers with all of these things. All of this data, and it's incredibly numbers-driven for sure, and a lot of it, but not all of it, helps you to get a really good understanding of where the business is today. I've done a podcast and talked about this many times. I did a podcast called Know Your Numbers. I did a podcast called VFR to IFR. And that is, you know, you're flying, you're sitting in the cockpit of your business, you're flying your business not by what you can see and feel and walk around, but actually by the knobs and the dials and switches. I'll give you just two examples. One business I was working with yesterday does $2.4 million in top line revenue. By 2028, they want to get to $10 million. Well, are they going to get to $10 million by hope and a prayer? Are they going to get there just by some marketing strategy? Are they going to get there by actually understanding what are the drivers in the business? And then what does it actually look like to be at $10 million? And then let's go sit in the cockpit of that business. And now that we know how to get there, we can start to manipulate the numbers to be able to do it. Another business I was working with just a few years ago was doing 7— the that was actually today, $7 million in top line. Now they're doing a little about $3 million, and they want to also scale to $10 million. Regardless of what your number is, maybe you're doing $300,000 and you would love to get your business to a million in top line revenue. Do you know the numbers of what it takes to get there? Or is it just what I used to be, which is just my work ethic, just me going and being a rainmaker for the business? Really being just the operator in the day-to-day. I never really understood what it meant to really step into and become and sit in the owner's seat. What does it really mean to be a true CEO? You have to know your numbers. You have to have a really good understanding of where you are. Even some of it gets to the narrative of, what about those decisions you made to get to this point? And what are the numbers today? What does your sales pipeline look like? What— in fact, how long does it take to go— does a lead— does it take a lead to go from the time that they— you first get the lead to becoming a customer? That's called your lead conversion cycle. How long is that? Well, on average, maybe we have a 65-day lead conversion cycle. This was incredibly important in the construction company that I was working with. We wanted to see clearly— it's nice if a lead comes in, you book in a call, they— you go out there and, and meet with them, and they, within 2 days, they sign a contract. But that's often not at all how it is, even in, uh, maybe higher volume industries. It's not that way. Sure, does it happen occasionally that somebody comes in, you've got to— maybe they walked in, called in, uh, you reached out to them, and you close them the same day? Sure, absolutely. But on average, is that the way it typically is? No. Knowing how long it takes to lead to work through your pipeline is very, very valuable. Why? What if you were trying to hit some numbers, some sales targets? You would know how much do we need to spend, how long is it going to take us to be able to push these leads through the pipeline. How many people do you actually have in your pipeline? Does your sales team know how many are actually in their pipeline, or is that kind of an unknown number? That's incredibly important to know from a sales side. Not to mention, how many sales did you do last year? I can't tell you how many times I've asked that question. What were your sales last year? Sales, not revenue, not profit. How many sales did you do? I don't know. Well, I mean, was it like 20? Or was it like 200? Well, it was closer to like maybe 100. Okay, well, what was— was it closer to 100 or like 50? Whatever that may be. And that's not in any way to give shame or guilt to anybody that's listening to this in any way. It hopefully is more refreshing to hear that other people also didn't know these numbers. And I'll be the first to raise my hand to be that person that did not know until I got myself around other entrepreneurs who were asking me some of these questions. And I would hear them and go, oh yeah, I probably should know that number, don't— shouldn't I? But I have no idea. And so they were guesses, and I would take my best guesses, but then I would go back. I'll give you one recently that was asked of me, and I thought I knew this, and I took a guess, but I actually ended up having to go, uh, go back and look. The question was asked to me of one of my coaches, Daniel Priestley, which you can find many of his books— Entrepreneurial Revolution, Oversubscribed— and just incredible entrepreneurial coach. He asked me actually on a Zoom call, he goes, how many leads does it take until you get a sale? And I was like, oh man, I actually don't know that number. He said, ours is 66 to 1. For every 66 leads that we get, we make a sale. And I know exactly how much it costs me to be able to get a lead. That means I also know what my customer acquisition cost is. Now, there's maybe other episodes down the road that I've done to maybe kind of go in depth into some of these ratios and, and how to calculate some of that. My bigger point here, and the thing that I want to really try to get across today is the importance of really understanding where the business is today. I, I'll tell you transparently, I was working with a business owner and he said, hey, I just want to— this was really hard for us. As I went through this, I knew that we needed to know these numbers and actually caused a fight between me and my wife. This is one of my clients sharing this with me. He said not in a relationship way, but really just because they work together in the business. And he said, but it was so helpful though, because over the last several years, we were just going through the motions. And as we were going through this, I kind of realized, oh man, I really did need to know these numbers. This would have been so helpful. He said, by having someone kind of forcing me to go and grab this data, look for these numbers, and try to figure some of this out. It was so helpful because I realized I didn't know some of these, but we learned so much just in the process of grabbing these numbers. Let me try to be that for all of you today. Some of the things, maybe it's not everything that I mentioned, but unless you are working with a coach or consultant of, in some capacity, and somebody is pushing on you, You may not have any reason to go and try to find some of these numbers, but if you really truly want to grow and scale your business, I think it's imperative to have a good, really good understanding and good grasp on where the business is today. Maybe some of the things that I shared are fairly high, uh, fairly complex and have a lot of moving pieces, and it takes some time to do that. Start with some of the basic ones. Start with what has been my year-over-year top line revenue growth and my profitability, and how am I doing? Doing relative to the Rule of 40? What is my cost per lead and how much are we spending in marketing relative to our revenue? That's good numbers to be able to know. What about, um, our sales pipeline? What does our sales pipeline look like? And then you can get into some of the other things like lead conversion cycle and the number of leads to, to make a sale. Then you can eventually get down into things like your customer acquisition cost, which of course you can Google or use AI to help you to be able to figure that out. What I hope I've done today is just to share with you some beliefs, to break some beliefs around really getting a good understanding of where the business is today, your point A, so that ultimately in the next step we'll begin to build point B. Where do you want to take your business? Then from there we'll do another step and we'll begin to form what is really and truly a roadmap for your company. I hope this helped you today. If you'd like to come and learn some other strategies like this, go to my website blueprintos.com/assets, register for my upcoming web class. I look forward to seeing you there. All right, everyone, till next time, lead well and go be great.
