I nearly made a hire because my business felt busy
I could see the revenue. I couldn’t see what was left. In a benchmark of 509 service firms, more than four in five fell short of their own margin target.
I remember sitting down to work out whether I could afford to bring someone into the business.
There was enough work coming in. I was doing far too much myself, and getting some help seemed like the obvious next step. So I started looking at what was coming in each month.
And then I caught myself. I was looking at revenue.
That wasn’t the number I needed. I needed to know what was left after expenses, what I’d already committed to paying, and whether I could comfortably cover another person’s costs for the next three months.
I couldn’t answer that straight away. I had the information. Some of it was in my bank statements, some in spreadsheets, and some was honestly just in my head. I was about to make a recurring commitment based on how busy the business felt.
I spent 20 years building the systems inside HSBC Private Bank, Natixis and Zurich that let those institutions see their money. I still nearly did it.
I see the same moment with owners all the time. The revenue is the number you can say from memory. Twelve months of work, a figure you would once have called a dream (remember those days?). And still, before you sign off on a hire, you check the bank account. Quietly, with the door closed.
The habit is rational. Two numbers in your business have quietly separated, and nobody on your payroll is responsible for measuring the space between them.
The whole industry does this. SPI Research’s 2026 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark surveyed 509 services organisations. The average firm hit 90.1% of its revenue target last year. Only 17.2% hit their margin target in full.
Good at earning, poor at keeping. I see the same pattern with my clients.
The same benchmark has a stranger fact in it. Project margins are at a five-year high. Revenue leakage, the money lost to unbilled work and write-offs, is at a five-year low. And yet what those firms keep before tax and financing (EBITDA, if you want the technical name) sits 28% below their own five-year average.
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Every project is priced better than ever. Less money leaks out of delivery than ever. The firm as a whole keeps less than it has in years.
So the gap lives between the projects: bench time, overhead that grew layer by layer, pay decisions made one at a time, cash sitting in the wrong places. The places nothing in your monthly profit and loss owns.
This took the biscuit. Asked how they plan to fix profit, executives in the same study ranked more marketing and more selling as their top two answers (silent scream). It’s like running a marathon without knowing the distance, so you just keep running.
The banks had to be forced into it. One assignment stays with me: implementing MiFID II, a European rule for investment firms, across HSBC’s European entities, from France to Malta, held to the strictest regulator in the room (them fines are no joke).
Strip out the acronym and the rule asked for one thing: every client had to be able to see what they were being charged, and what each fund could reasonably earn them. Banks spent fortunes to make that visible, because the go-live date was fixed and the fines were steep.
There is no MiFID II for a service business. You are the regulator.
I call the gap the Revenue-Profit Leak: the distance between what a business earns and what the owner actually keeps. The leaks happen where that distance widens, and you can’t close a distance you’ve never measured.
Here is the five-minute version. Take your last full quarter and write two numbers side by side.
First: what your business earned.
Second: what it kept, meaning your own pay plus the profit that stayed in the business.
The first you can probably say from memory. If the second takes you more than five minutes, you’ve met the leak’s first symptom.
That’s the difference measurement makes. The next hire gets decided from a screen, with the door open.
Anwin Mbah is the founder of Wealthfluency. This piece first appeared in A Case for Profit, her weekly case for owners of service businesses. Every case starts with her own thinking, from client work and twenty years building the systems institutions run on. She uses AI the way those institutions use analysts: to research, structure and pressure-test the argument. The claims, the judgement and the final pass are hers.
