Jacqueline SnyderFounder and CEO of The Product Boss

Don't Get Caught in the Revenue Trap!

13 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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A short coaching video by Jacqueline Snyder warning entrepreneurs not to confuse revenue with financial health. Snyder contrasts vanity metrics (e.g., "I'm making a million dollars") with the reality of low owner pay and low profit, arguing that profit—and the personal freedom it enables—is more important than top-line revenue. She illustrates this with an example of a student who generated $1,000,000 in revenue yet paid herself only ~5%, and recommends prioritizing profit and owner pay.

Chapters

Revenue numbers are vanity. Profit is freedom. I'm also working with another student. I said to her, I was like, okay, so what's your revenue? She's like, I'm making a million dollars. Amazing. But her problem was that she wasn't paying herself. So imagine that you're bringing in a million dollars and you were only making 5% and you're not paying yourself at that point. Your business, that revenue number is just a vanity number. It's just a number that you can say, yeah, my business made a million bucks. But you know what's better than your business making a million bucks? Your business making half a million dollars and you keeping $200,000 after it. Right. The total amount of revenue generated is great. But what I really want you to lean into and start to think about is the profit. What profit is left over. There's vanity and then there's success, then there's profitability, then there's freedom behind the profit.