P&L: Priorities & Lifestyle Episode 99

The Real Cost of Doing Business: Tracking Essential KPIs with Ruth King

This week on P&L, I’m joined by Ruth King, a renowned financial consultant and profitability expert in the HVAC, plumbing, and electrical industries. With a background in chemical engineering and an MBA in finance, Ruth brings a highly analytical, numbers-first approach to building and scaling home service businesses. In this episode, she breaks down the specific KPIs every business owner should be tracking, the crucial importance of moving your company through "no man's land" by building a management team, and why running personal expenses through your business is a terrible strategy if you ever plan to sell.

Tune in this week on P&L to learn how to keep your books clean, track your true overhead, and prepare your business for a successful eventual transition.

Connect with Ruth King directly via text at 678-296-4123.

This week on Priorities & Lifestyle:

Defining the "Revenue-Generating Unit": Why understanding exactly how your business creates revenue is the very first step toward profitability.
Tracking Your Overhead Cost Per Hour: Why generating $10 million in revenue doesn't matter if your net profit is only $1.21 an hour.
The "No Man's Land" of Growth: The dangerous phase where an owner transitions from micro-managing to needing a true management team.
The Five-Minute Daily Fraud Check: Why checking your bank and credit card statements every single day is the ultimate defense against embezzlement.
Working Capital 101: How to track the "grease for the machine" and why declining working capital usually points to declining profitability.
The "Die in Your Chair or Sell" Reality: Why you need to build hobbies and a life outside of your business so you have something to exit to.

Our Favorite Quotes:

"You're going to exit your business. Either you're going to die in your chair or you're going to sell it... It's much better to plan the exit rather than have the exit happen to you." — Ruth King
"If you're only looking at year-end statements, you'll never see a monthly statement. And so as a result, [fraud or manipulation] gets hidden until we dump all the months into the software." — Ruth King
"We are all mortals... if all that ever really happened is exactly the way we drew it up when we were 18, that would be so boring." — Rob Schulz

About Rob Schulz and P&L Priorities & Lifestyle Podcast

The P&L: Priorities & Lifestyle Podcast is a show for business owners. In each episode, host and financial planner Rob Schulz sits down with business owners and the professionals that serve them to talk about business building, life, money, and the all-important transition out of the business, which inevitably happens to everyone who has ever founded a company.