Can You Afford to Market

The chart is a staircase of falling bars starting at $2M in sales. Each step down is another cost - the people doing the work, the managers, overhead, owner pay - until only about 3 percent is left to spend on getting new work. The profit looks healthy at first, but once the real cost of delivering the work is counted, the money left over is tiny. What you can actually spend to grow is far smaller than the headline number suggests.