I was looking at a P&L last week for a brand doing about $4M a year.
On paper? Profitable.
In reality? The founder couldn't sleep.
Every decision felt heavy. Scaling ad spend felt risky. Inventory buys felt like cliff jumps. One bad week would send them scrambling.
Here's what was wild … The business wasn't broken.
Revenue was real. Ads were working. Customers liked the product.
But something was off.
And here's the thing most founders miss: There's a massive difference between "profitable" and "profitable enough."
Profitable means the math works.
Profitable enough means you have room to breathe.
When you don't have that room … when margin is thin … you lose something critical.
You lose patience.
And when you lose patience, you start making "reasonable" short-term decisions that quietly break everything you've built.
You discount because you need relief.
You chase tactics because you need certainty.
You overreact to normal variance because you can't afford to be wrong.
None of this is a character flaw. It's mechanical.
Thin margin forces short-term thinking. Not because you're weak. Because the system doesn't give you room to wait.
Tomorrow I'm going to walk you through why this matters more than almost anything else in your business.
Because here's the truth most people won't tell you …
Profit isn't the reward you get after growth. Profit is the requirement that makes growth possible.
See you tomorrow,
Jeremiah
P.S. If you're reading this and thinking "Wait, that's me" … you're not alone. This is the most common pattern I see between $1M and $30M. Stay tuned.
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