Welcome to Make Bank. I’m a CPA, MBA and founder helping other founders think bigger about their money. I share the financial intelligence you'll need to scale from 6 to 8 figures, build real wealth, and create a business that gives you options.

Picture this: you're sitting across from a Shark Tank investor, pitching a business they've never heard of. They lean back, cross their arms, and ask one of these questions:

"What Are Your Sales?"

"What Are Your Profit Margins?"

"What is your EBITDA?"

"What's your wages (or contractor spend) to revenue ratio?"

If you freeze up or your eyes glaze over right now imagining that moment, you're not alone. And that's exactly the gap we're closing today.

In this issue, I'm breaking down the four numbers every founder needs to know cold, why so many talented owners skip tracking them, and the simple monthly habit that turns confusion into confidence.

Founders who master this are able to scale from six figures into seven and eight figures with clarity instead of guesswork.

To the founders who are flying blind

A lot of business owners can tell you how their sales felt last month, but they can't tell you what their gross profit margin actually is.

And that disconnect is quietly capping their growth.

Why does this happen so often? A few reasons show up again and again:

First: Founders assume "revenue" and "profit" are the same conversation. They're just not, and mixing them up hides real problems until cash gets tight.

Second: Tracking KPIs feels like a "someday" task, or something to figure out once the business is "big enough." Spoiler alert: the businesses that get big are the ones tracking KPIs right now, regardless of how small they are (yes, even the $100K revenue businesses can, and should, track KPIs).

Third: The first budget line item so many founders cut, especially in the early lean-and-mean stage, is a qualified accountant. It feels like a nice-to-have. It's actually the foundation everything else stands on.

One shining light: None of this requires an MBA or a finance degree. It requires four numbers, a system, and consistency.

Let's dig into the four numbers to track every month, and do it in a way that's written in plain English.

Number 1: Track Your Annual Revenue Growth.

This tells you not just what you made, but how your business is trending against industry expectations. A founder who only glances at monthly totals is missing the story of momentum.

Compare your growth rate to your industry's benchmark, not just to your own gut feeling <-- that's the difference between "we had a good month" and "we're actually outpacing our sector."

Numbers 2 and 3: Track Your Gross Profit Margin and Operating Profit Margin.

Here's where so many founders go sideways: they look at how much money came in the door and celebrate, without ever checking what's left after costs eat into it. Skipping this step is how a business can look busy on the surface while quietly draining its own capital underneath.

Gross margin tells you if your product or service is priced and produced well.

Operating margin tells you if your business is being run well.

Let's break these down in plain terms, because the names sound similar but they're telling you two very different stories.

Gross profit margin answers one question: after you pay for the actual cost of making or delivering your product or service, how much is left?

Say you sell a $100 product, and it costs you $40 in materials, production, or direct labor to make it. Your gross profit is $60, which means your gross profit margin is 60%.

This number tells you whether your pricing and your production costs are actually working together in your favor. If your margin is thin or low, it means you're barely making money on each sale before you've even paid rent, marketing, or your own salary. No amount of sales volume will fix that on its own. A low margin doesn't get better by selling more. It just means you're busier while making the same (or less).

Operating profit margin goes a layer deeper. It asks: after you pay for everything it takes to run the business (think payroll, software, marketing, rent, admin, etc.) how much is actually left?

This is where the real health of a business shows up. You can have a great gross margin and still be losing money every month, if your operating costs are out of control. Maybe you're overstaffed for your revenue level. Maybe your ad spend isn't converting the way it used to. Maybe your subscriptions and tools have quietly piled up. Operating margin is the number that catches all of that.

Why do both numbers matter, side by side?

Because they tell you where to look when something's off:

• If gross margin is strong but operating margin is weak, the problem isn't your product - it's how the business is being run.
• If gross margin itself is weak, no amount of operational tightening will save you; you need to revisit your pricing or your production costs directly.

Founders who only track total revenue are essentially checking their business's pulse without ever taking its blood pressure. You can look alive and still be quietly unhealthy. Gross and operating margin are the two vitals that tell you the truth, every single month, before a small leak turns into a real crisis.

Number 4: Track Wages-to-Revenue (or Contractor ROI).

This is the light at the end of the tunnel step, since it ties everything else together.

If your team costs are ballooning faster than your revenue, you're not scaling … you're stretching. Founders who monitor this ratio can spot payroll or contractor bloat months before it becomes a crisis, giving them room to invest in growth instead of just plugging holes.

A quick note on getting these numbers

The easy route is asking an AI tool to scrape the internet for industry averages.

The better route is pulling a report from IBISWorld, the gold standard in market research. These reports run around $2,000, but they are worth their weight in, well, gold!

Reports range from 70 to 100 pages of real, current industry intelligence. I first fell in love with these during my MBA program at the University of Florida. I use them with my advisory clients and I recommend them to any founder trying pushing past six figures into seven and eight.

Bonus Number to Consider Including: NPS

One more number worth watching, though it didn't make the core four: Net Promoter Score.

So many companies skip tracking it entirely, which is unfortunate, since it's hard to iterate your product or service around what customers actually want if you're not measuring whether they'd recommend you in the first place.

The Recap

If you remember nothing else from this issue, remember this:

Healthy businesses measure and benchmark their numbers to the industry.

Annual revenue growth. Gross and operating profit margin. Wages-to-revenue or contractor ROI. Track these four every single month, benchmark them against your industry, and you'll know within weeks whether you're building wealth or just generating busy work.

And here's the number that makes all four of these possible: the cost of a solid accountant.

Cutting that expense to save a little cash upfront is how founders end up stuck. You know the saying, “garbage numbers in, garbage decisions out”. Investing in quality digits isn't just part of overhead. It's the one line item that lets every other number in your business tell the truth.

Track these numbers consistently for six months, and you might just see exactly where your next six-figure opportunity is hiding in plain sight.

Now here's the twist most founders never expect:

The Shark Tank investor who seemed impossible to satisfy, the one demanding four perfect numbers before writing a check?

That investor is you.

You've been waiting on someone else's approval to take your business seriously, when the real green light was always your own willingness to open the books and look. Now that you have the tools, it’s time to get to work.

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And if you're just getting your business off the ground and want to know when you can quit your W2 to go full time in your company, I'm creating something new called The Founder’s Runway. It's a financial sprint built specifically to help new entrepreneurs launch with clarity instead of chaos. DM me for more info.

About the Author

Caroline Beasley is a CPA, MBA, and Big 4/Big 8-trained accountant who works as a strategic CFO for founders scaling past $1M in revenue. She helps business owners trade gut feel for real financial clarity by showing them true profit margins, protecting cash flow, and building a dashboard that shows in seconds whether the month is on track.

She's especially passionate about helping women founders and creators access the CFO-level thinking that fuels sustainable growth. A military spouse and IRONMAN triathlete, she believes lasting success comes from discipline and boundaries, not burnout.

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