I recently completed a three year analysis of all the projects that my group has performed and all of the revenue that we received. It was fascinating to align the work side and revenue side and see where things matched up and where (to put it mildly) things just went off the rails. Working in the real estate brokerage world means that we have a lot of flexibility in how we get paid – we can be very creative in putting together deals for the consulting work we do.
So as an outcome of this we discovered some very intriguing facts – we didn’t make money the way we thought we did. In hindsight the numbers all made sense but without putting it all on paper we would never have come to the full range of conclusions. We had one service line that was a clear winner – we all knew it was good but not that good. A couple of our high profile lines were okay, but not nearly as good as we had thought. Essentially the way we made money was not aligned with how we were selling.
This raises the question for everyone out there – have you actually gone through and developed a real understanding of how you make money? And if not, what surprises are waiting for you?