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That Doesn't Add Up
A short letter every Monday. One business problem, the math under it, and one move for your week. For owners who want to see where the money is going before they change anything.
Send me the Monday letterSound familiar?
- You're generating more leads, but your own income is stalling.
- The business keeps growing, and all you feel is more pressure.
- One or two bad weeks crush the month, and you can't see why.
- Every answer lives in your head, so everything waits on you.
Most owners try to fix this with more. More leads, more hires, another meeting, another coach.
To me, that's the trap. If each new client leaves you thin money after what it costs to win them and deliver the work, more clients just make you busier.
A good month hides it. A bad month shows it.
It's usually one thing. Find that first.
Where to start
Three ways in, depending on how much help you want.
Do it yourself
The Profitable Business
Free tools and frameworks from the book. Start with the diagnostic: score seven areas of your business and see which one is holding the rest back. For owners who would rather work through it on their own.
Take the free diagnosticIt's called the FREEDOM Diagnostic. It takes about 3 minutes.
Done with you
Metric Mentor Labs
My team finds your constraint with you, installs the fix inside your business, and runs a weekly review with you until it holds. For owners doing $1M to $25M a year where the work is delivered by people.
Apply for a callAbout Steve Kopshaw
I learned this the hard way, in a back office in Scarsdale.
I'm Steve Kopshaw. I help owners of service and education businesses find the one thing holding their income back, and fix it.
Here's how I got here.
I started out as an engineering student, dropped out, and became a paid firefighter. I took a gym job for the free membership.
I trained clients at New York Sports Clubs for $28 an hour, starting at 4:30 in the morning. After gas and coffee I netted about $500 a week. That's why I moved into management, and it's why I still care what trainers take home.
By 2006 I was a manager there. I was 21, and honestly, I was pretty bad at it. It was the first time I had a P&L and had to lead people older than me.
Then I opened a Fitness Together studio in Wyckoff, New Jersey. I trained clients and did paperwork from sunup to sundown, Monday through Saturday. On Sundays I mopped, restocked, and drove around town comparing prices on water bottles. Within a year it was one of the top-performing locations in the system.
So I bought a second studio, in Scarsdale, New York. Same playbook, same energy.
It slid toward the red.
I sat in the back office and stared at the numbers longer than I'd like to admit. The town wasn't the problem. The strategy wasn't the problem. Every sale, every standard and every small call ran through me, and I couldn't be in two places at once.
I was the system.
My first fix was to hire more people. A month went by, then two, and nothing changed. The real constraint was me. I handed out targets instead of context, and everything still lived in my head.
It took me 18 months to learn that. We went from flirting with red back to consistent six-figure months by finding the one real constraint, fixing it, and then finding the next one.
From there I grew to 17 locations and 65 employees. In 2018 I started selling the studios and moved into consulting. That became Metric Mentor Labs.
Since then my team and I have worked with 100+ companies, and we're closing in on $350M installed.
I see the same pattern all the time. A founder called me certain he had a lead problem. He was doing about $1.8 million a year. We opened his CRM and found 847 leads from the last 18 months that never got a real follow-up. He didn't need more leads. He needed a way to work the ones he already had.
I wrote all of it down in From Traction to Freedom, out Monday, November 16.
You don't have a hundred problems. You have one constraint and ninety-nine symptoms.
If you're the system right now.
There's a good chance you're reading this because the business runs through you. You haven't done anything wrong. You've reached the point where working harder stops working and the job changes.
Start wherever fits.
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