103 | Your Bank Account Is Lying to You: The AI Business Audit Series (Part 1)

What if the offer or service you’re most proud of is the one that’s secretly draining your profits?

Welcome to Part 1 of the "AI Business Audit" series. 

In this Thursday episode, Dawn Andrews reveals why most founders are flying blind when it comes to knowing which offers are actually profitable. If your bank account is growing but you’re still burned out, this episode is for you.

Dawn walks you through the first step of her Four-Dimensional Business Audit Framework: Revenue Reality. You’ll learn how to uncover the hidden truth behind your revenue numbers, why total revenue is misleading, and how to calculate what your time is really worth. Plus, you’ll hear how AI can do the heavy lifting in this process so you can stop guessing and start optimizing.

Book a CEO Clarity Call to run your AI-powered business audit with Dawn. Stop guessing and start leading.

Key Takeaways

• Revenue doesn’t equal profit — You need to break it down by offer and delivery time.
• Most founders can’t name their highest ROI offer — That’s a huge blind spot.
• AI can analyze your revenue fast — but only strategy can tell you what to do with it.
• Your most time-consuming offer might be your least profitable — it’s time to check.
• Audit your revenue per hour — It might just change everything.

Resources & Links

• CEO Clarity Call Booking Link

Related Episodes:

• Ep 105 The Time Tax: How Founders Waste 24 Hours a Week (AI Business Audit Part 2) (coming soon)
• Ep 107 The Client Costing You Six Figures: AI Business Audit Series Finale (Part 3) (coming soon)

Want to increase revenue and impact? Listen to “She's That Founder” for insights on business strategy and female leadership to scale your business. Each episode offers advice on effective communication, team building, and management. Learn to master routines and systems to boost productivity and prevent burnout. Our delegation tips and business consulting will advance your executive leadership skills and presence.

Transcript

She's That Founder
103 | Your Bank Account Is Lying to You: The AI Business Audit Series (Part 1)

Your bank account is lying to you. Not about how much money is in it, but about where it came from. 

According to a 2024 Deloitte study, 46% of business owners. Half of us roughly can't accurately identify their most profitable service or product. We look at revenue and we think we know what's working, but we don't. We're making business decisions based on stories we're telling ourselves instead of what the data is actually saying, and that is costing us big time. 

Over the next three weeks, I am breaking down the four dimension AI business audit framework that every founder should understand. 

Today we're starting with revenue reality because if you don't know where your money is actually coming from, every other decision you're making is a guess.

Let's go. 

Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to She's That Founder Thursday edition. These are the quick rants kick in the pants, velvet boot moments that represent me standing in the future, pulling you toward the even stronger, better, more powerful version of yourself using AI as your copilot.

Last week I was on a call with a founder. Let's call her Lisa, and she dropped this bomb. Dawn, I am working 60 hours a week and I don't even feel like I'm getting anywhere. I don't even know if what I'm doing matters and I know that some of y'all out there are working a lot more than that.

And to not be able to tell if what you're doing matters. That's rough. So I asked her, where's your money coming from? Silence. Which service line, which offer that you're selling is most profitable, silence. Do you have an idea of what your revenue per hour is on each of your services? She laughed.

The uncomfortable laugh, that means I have no idea and I'm embarrassed about it. here's what's important. Lisa is smart. She's been in business six years. She has spreadsheets. She looks at her numbers. She works with her accounting team, but she was looking at total revenue, not where it came from, not which offers were actually profitable. And when we finally ran the analysis together, she discovered that 40% of her revenue came from one offer that took maybe 15% of her time.

Meanwhile, the offer she was most proud of, the one she talks about in every sales call, the one she thought was her signature offer was breaking even at best. Same hours, completely different. ROI, she'd been betting on the wrong horse for about two years or so. I know sometimes you have to kill your darlings, but we'll talk about that in a minute.

So this is what I call revenue reality, and it's, I mean, I'm just gonna be honest with you. I've been there and it's painful to look at sometimes. But it is the first dimension of a business audit because if you get this wrong, then anything you do after it is actually really pointless.

Revenue Reality answers one question. Where does your money actually come from? Not where you think it comes from, not where you want it to come from, but where does it actually come from? And here's what you need to look at, number one. Revenue offer by type. So getting right into this, right? This is the business audit and you're gonna need to save all of this information to be able to use it with AI.

So here's what you need to look at. First, revenue offer by type for the last 90 days at least. Not just total revenue, like the one big number. Break it down, which things that you sold, which offers generated what? 

Number two, look at the time and team to deliver each of those offers. So how many hours does it take you to deliver, say a thousand dollars worth of that service and just come up with what that core number is.

And number three, what's the revenue per hour? And this is where founders' eyes get really big. Because you think that an offer that brings in 15 20, 50 K is great until you realize that it took three times the amount of hours that you expected and you end up with a really low hourly number. 

Is that good? Is that bad? Well, it depends on your goals and your offers. 

So for instance, if you have an offer that brings in 5K, it's great until you realize that it took 40 hours of time, potentially yours at the highest possible rate, and maybe even additional team members. So all of a sudden that offer is netting you about $125 an hour.

Is that good? I don't know. Like I don't know. You tell me, but I would imagine for you to have the time back in your life to do the things that you wanna do, $125 an hour on your offer is not enough of a margin. 

And finally, here's number four that you need for your business audit. The ratio which offers are high revenue, low time, those are your gold. If you could sell those all day and twice on Sundays, you would have a completely different life in your business. And which ones are low revenue, high time? Do those need to be cut, restructured, repriced or rethought so that they turn into high revenue, low time?

So I'm just gonna slow down for a second. Here's where AI comes in. AI can help you organize this data fast. You can upload your revenue spreadsheet and ask analyze my revenue by offer type for Q3. So if we go back 90 days, right, or at the end of the year, show me which offers generated the most revenue and calculate my revenue per hour based on delivery time.

And AI will give it to you instantly, but, and this is critical, AI doesn't know what to do with that information. AI doesn't know if $125 an hour is good for your business model and stage. It, doesn't know if you should raise prices, cut the offer altogether, or scale it. That requires strategic business expertise, and that's where someone like me comes in.

I'm sharing all of this with you today so that you can get started, and also to remember that sometimes you need a strategic partner at your side to help walk through all of this. At minimum you need to know these numbers because right now you might be flying blind. And just to out myself, when I ran my own revenue reality audit, I discovered I had an offer generating solid revenue that I hated delivering every single time. And I had another offer that I loved that was barely breaking even. 

So I restructured both of them. I trimmed one down. I tripled the price on the other. Same hours of delivery, but way better profit for me and way more aligned with how I actually wanted to spend my time. And it was uncomfortable. I'm just gonna be real like to let go of some of the things that I really loved and find ways to maybe fold them into something else. But it made a huge difference. And now I have a lot more free time. 

So remember, this is the three part series. We're in part one, revenue reality. Here's your homework, and if you do this homework before the next Thursday episode, you'll be able to build on it. 

So here's your homework before the next Thursday episode, pull your revenue data for the last 90 days. Break it down by offer. Then ask yourself, do I know how much time each offer requires? Do I know my revenue per hour? Oh, and here's a little bonus nugget you guys, when you're figuring out your revenue per hour, don't forget the r and d part of it, whatever it took for you to develop that offer.

It's usually a one-time investment, and then not much after that, just the delivery time, but include that in the overall cost of delivering your offer. So do you know your revenue per hour? If the answer's no, you're guessing and guessing is expensive. Figure out your revenue per hour and let AI help you.

And you can even ask it additional question. You can ask it to ask you questions to help clarify its responses. So there you go. Quick hit, right? That's what Thursdays are about. So we got revenue reality next week. Time truth, where your hours are actually going and why most of what fills your calendar probably isn't moving revenue.

If you think revenue reality was eye-opening, wait until you see where your time is leaking, and here's what I want you to sit with this week. What if the offer you're spending the most time on is the one making you the least money? What if the thing you're most proud of is the thing that's keeping you broke?

That's revenue reality, and it's just the first dimension, and I know how brave you are and that you can face this. So, if you don't want to wait until next week for the next part of this series and you wanna run this audit with me helping you, you can book a CEO Clarity call. We'll look at your numbers together.

I'll show you how to use AI so that you can have it as your co-pilot moving forward, and we'll get this done for you. You can find the link in the show notes. And until then, I'll see you Thursday for part two, the time tax you're paying. Take care of levies. I think you're amazing. 

Go do your business audit now and until then, I'm Dawn Andrews and you're listening to, She's That Founder.