Last year, I ran this process on my own companies.

We found $103,413.16 a month in trapped cash.

$1.2 million a year. Already in the business. Already earned. Going to the wrong places.

In the past six months alone, we’ve distributed $1,060,000 that used to disappear into an expense structure that had quietly gotten away from us.

Some of it was payroll. Some was software. Some was overhead that had quietly multiplied for years.

But we could only make those calls because we finally had the numbers in front of us, benchmarked against what those categories should actually be.

Without the diagnostic, you’re guessing who to cut and why. With it, you’re deciding.

My businesses were growing. Revenue was up. From the outside, everything looked healthy.

But I was paying myself less than I should have been (for longer than I’d like to admit).

We didn’t hire a CFO. Didn’t bring in consultants. Didn’t run a six-month engagement.

One afternoon. The right benchmarks. An honest look at five numbers.

And the only advice I had to ignore was my own: that you can grow your way out of it.

You can’t. If your expense ratios are off, every new dollar of revenue feeds the same leaks. I knew that.

I just hadn’t looked at my own numbers.

I’m not a financial advisor. I’m a founder who’s built and scaled multiple companies, helped hundreds of others find the same thing, and still had $100K a month going to the wrong places until I ran this exercise.

So in this workshop, I want to give you the same afternoon I had (compressed into 90 minutes, with your actual numbers) so you can find what’s hiding in your P&L starting right now.

The backstory:

I’ve spent 20+ years building businesses and helping thousands of founders at $2M–$20M think through revenue, team structure, and operating systems.

I teach this stuff for a living.

And for years, my answer to “I’m not taking home enough” was the same answer everyone gives: grow your way out of it. Push harder on the top line. Hit the next milestone. The personal payoff comes with scale.

I believed it. I taught it.

I was wrong.

Not because revenue growth is bad. It isn’t. But because I was answering the right question for the wrong problem.

The question most founders are actually asking isn’t “how do I grow faster?” It’s “why is all this growth not showing up in my bank account?”

Those are completely different problems. And most founders spend years trying to solve the first one when the second is where all the leverage is.

I kept looking at the top line and ignoring the structure.

Every time my personal take-home felt light, I’d go look at the pipeline. Run another launch. Close more deals. And it would work… for a quarter. Then the expenses would catch up. The team had grown. The software stack had expanded. The overhead had quietly crept up to absorb whatever new revenue we’d added.

The business was a treadmill. We kept running. We kept earning more. And the gap between what the business made and what I took home barely moved.
I didn’t need more revenue. I needed to look at where the money was actually going.

So last year, I finally did.

We pulled every expense category. Benchmarked them against industry targets. Found what had drifted, not dramatically, just quietly, over time. And made the decisions we could finally make because the data was in front of us instead of our gut.

We found $103,413.16 a month.

That afternoon changed how I think about my own business. And it’s why I built this workshop.

Because if I had this problem (with everything I know, everything I teach) you probably do too.

Here’s the real issue:

Most financial advice is designed for businesses that aren’t making enough money yet. Cut expenses. Raise prices. Add revenue streams.

That’s not your problem. You have revenue. You have customers. The business is working.

The problem is structural. The expense ratios have drifted. The categories that should be in range aren’t. And nobody… not the founder, not the CFO, not the bookkeeper… has ever sat down and asked what these numbers should actually be for a business your size.

Your bookkeeper knows where every dollar went last month.

That’s not the same as knowing where it should have gone.

95% of financial advice is designed to track money. Not to redesign how it flows.