Business Growth Blueprint with Mark Fitzgerald

Stop Guessing: Learn The Numbers That Drive Sales And Scale

• Mark Fitzgerald • Episode 9

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Your P&L tells a story about yesterday. Growth happens when you learn the numbers that steer tomorrow. Mark breaks down the 12 essential metrics that connect your marketing to profit, showing how small improvements across the funnel compound into outsized gains. If you’ve ever felt outspent by “marketing gorillas,” this is the playbook they’re using—clear, practical, and built for real businesses.

We start by challenging the habit of relying on year-end accounts, then map a smarter path from leads to prospects to paying customers. You’ll hear a simple comparison between a cold e-commerce push and a nurture-first campaign that multiplies conversions at the same ad spend. From there, we unpack the full chain: leads, prospect conversion, active prospects, customer conversion, number of sales, average order value, and total revenue—then translate those into gross margin, overheads, salaries, and net profit before tax. Along the way, you’ll learn why breakeven is the most liberating number in your business and how it lets you spend more, acquire faster, and outpace competitors without gambling.

Mark also shares a straightforward model for right-sized growth: products and services are the wings, marketing is the thrust, and overheads are the fuselage. Keep the wings strong, the thrust steady, and the body lean, and you’ll fly farther with less stress. Expect practical guidance on rounding to useful units, building a monthly scorecard, and deciding where to focus first—conversion, margin, or average order value—so every move compounds.

Ready to stop guessing and start scaling with clarity? Follow the 12 numbers, build your scorecard, and turn your marketing into a reliable profit engine. If this was helpful, subscribe, share it with a founder who needs it, and leave a quick review to help more builders find the show.

For more help and FREE tools and resources please visit..

www.markfitzgerald.com

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Email me at: mark@markfitzgerald.com


SPEAKER_00:

The 12 key numbers you need to know in your bees needs to be successful. You're in the right place. So you can live your life your life. Let's get somebody. Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Blueprint with me, your host, Mark Fitzgerald. I am a business owner, entrepreneur, coach, and a property investor. And I am here each and every week to help you s systemize, grow, and scale any business that you are involved in. In this episode, we're going to be looking at and talking about a few numbers. Now, if you're anything like me, you're going to be thinking, oh, I might skip this episode. I'm not good with the numbers. I leave all of that to my accountant. So uh why do I have to worry about it? Well, I was exactly the same as you. I used to avoid the numbers, avoid the spreadsheets any place that I could. And realistically, that was probably one of the biggest mistakes that I did. Yes, I always thought I had a handle on my numbers and I knew what I was making, I knew my profit and loss, and I could find my way around that, but I used to really leave it to where I was reviewing the accounts each and every year before I would have a good look at that. Now that is a huge mistake, and that is why your business may not be growing the way that you want. Why? Because basically, if you're looking at your profit and loss, and once your accountants have done your statements over the course of the year, you are looking at old data. Yes, it can tell you a story, but it tells you a story about what's happened, not what you could achieve. So, what I'm gonna help you with in this episode today is to really understand that. And we're gonna try and keep it as simple as possible. Because a lot of the times people are not growing their businesses. Now, whether that's you're in the trades and you're a builder, a plumber, an electrician, maybe you have a shop, maybe you have a factory, it doesn't matter. This is so important to get a handle on a master because it'll drive your business forward. If you can drive the numbers, you can drive your business forward, and a lot of that comes from your marketing as well. As again, we've spoken in previous episodes, people think marketing is a cost, and if you're not doing it correctly, it will become a cost, but you need to do things correctly. You see, the professional marketers follow you around the internet. These are professional marketers, by the way. They're advertising everywhere from Google to Facebook. They're advertising while you're asleep at night, they're waiting for you in the morning. They're always those pesky businesses that you love to hate. They're probably more successful than you. You know why? Because they know their numbers. And also, they also know that their numbers do not care about your feelings. You may have the greatest business in the world. You might be able to literally heal the earth, but without a well-designed marketing system, you're gonna lose every time you come up against the big marketing gorillas who know their numbers. But it doesn't have to be that way. When you properly know your numbers and understand them, you can play their game too. You can become a marketing gorilla in your market sector. Let's look at two examples, shall we? The first one is a run-of-the-mill e-commerce campaign. Let's say you get 1000 inquiry visitors to your website, you convert 1% into customers, so 10 of them buy at the average spend of£50. Your revenue is£500. That's not very exciting unless your cost per click was less than 50 pence, which is very, very unlikely in today's market. Now compare that to the much smarter campaign. You attract the same thousand visitors to your website, but this time, rather than trying to sell straight away, you give away something on your web page, a really useful piece of content. And as a result, you start to build up that no like and trust, and your conversion rate goes up. Now you get a hundred of those leads, and because you're educating people and helping them with how your product works or your service works, you increase their awareness of the problem which you solve. Your conversion rate then could jump from 1% to 8 or 12%. Now, for the same advertising spend, you've made and got 30 sales totaling 1500. And this isn't even an optimized campaign. You can add an additional marketing, up sales, down sales, post sales, and build in a plan that can increase that 1500 even further. If you have big big financial goals, and you should do if you own your own business, but you don't know your numbers, intimately you could be screwed. This is why the professional business marketers are winning in an era of the professional business people. They don't have better products than you, their services don't compare, but they understand their numbers. Business first and foremost is about profit. Without profit, you can't beat or make any headroom into your market. And without getting out there and marketing, you'll never have the reach and the impact that you want. For this to work, you've got to understand these 12 key numbers. Okay, the 12 key numbers are number one, your leads. Now, this could be your website visitors, number of homes that receive a flyer, your marketing or numbers of visitors to your stand if you're running trade shows. There are lots of variations depending on what your business is and the type of market that you're doing. In simple terms, though, this is the number at the top of your funnel. It is leads. This isn't customers or anything like that. This is just people learning about your business. Number two, you need to understand is the prospect conversion percentage. This is the rate at which you convert your leads into prospects. A prospect is somebody who, by their own behavior, has shown some interest in what it is that you do or sell. So for instance, this could be people who have filled out your opt-in form on your website or have gone and booked a meeting call with you. Number three, you need to have and be aware of your prospects. We've defined prospects already, but you have to now nurture those leads. Your ability to nurture your leads via your funnel can become a critical factor in the success of your marketing and gaining a rhythmic acquisition of customers. You can, for example, send them videos, emails, or you might even just get them on a phone or a Zoom call. The goal is to convert more of those leads into prospects. What makes someone a prospect as opposed to a lead will vary by business. In our business, for instance, a lead becomes a prospect when they have a discovery call and they have a nice little meeting with us, maybe a coffee, you know what I mean. In other words, the lead is a very raw person who comes at the top of the funnel but is gathering more and more information, getting to know us, getting to know, like, and trust us. The next number that we need to understand is your customer conversion percentage. So those leads that then go to prospects because they'll become warm leads. Now we're looking for sales, and we need to understand our conversion percentage. Not all our prospects will become customers. I sad to say. The rate at which you convert prospects to customers is your customer conversion. This is a critical number for you because it determines how many prospects and therefore how many leads you need in order to hit your goals for your financial terms. Number five, the number that we need is number of sales. This is probably the most straightforward number on the list. It's the number of sales that you make. So when we look back at this, it will be how many leads do we need to convert to prospects? Okay, and then how many of those prospects will convert to sales? Because once we understand how many leads we need to get in, we understand then in our marketing how many people we need to be reaching out to bringing into our funnel. Because then that will help us determine how many will become prospects because we'll have a percentage there, and then how many of those will convert into sales and actually start growing our business. Next, the number that you really want to understand and you want to be able to review is your average order value. Every time I work and coach a business owner, they say the same thing to me when I say your average order number. I don't know because people spend different amounts with me. The fact of the matter is you will have an average order value in your business, and that realistically is what on average your customers will spend. The truth is, this doesn't vary. There's always an average. I get it that the actual transaction size varies. Some customers spend a lot and others spend a little, but the average order value is simply the total value of your sales divided by the number of transactions. It really is that simple. Every business has a variance in transaction size, but every business also has an average order value, and it's your job to know what yours is. The next number is total revenue. Again, this is one that's nice and easy. For the purpose of this, you can work this out very easily, and this is the number of sales multiplied by the average transaction value. The absolute exact to the penny number doesn't really matter when it comes to your 12 key numbers. In our business, we work everything to the nearest 1000. You might work to the nearest 100 depending on the size of your business. On anything that is on or you're filling in, round it up to the nearest big number. Please don't bother with decimal points. Number eight is your gross margin percentage. Now, if you've got to this point, you're thinking to yourself, I'm confused already. What we will do is in the description below, I'm going to put a spreadsheet in there so you'll be able to see this for yourself. I might even include a little video there for me to explain this to you in more detail to help you out. But your gross margin percentage is the share of each sale that you get to keep in your business to contribute towards your overheads, okay, and your profit. So let's go through a little example of that. For example, if I'm selling tables, I buy my tables for 60 pounds, and then I sell my tables for£100. Let's keep the numbers really simple here. My gross profit margin on this would be 40%, which is£40 of every sale at£100. And of course, I get to keep that£40 once I've paid the£60 for the tables. Now it can be really helpful to get quite sophisticated with this number and add into it costs, all sums that are only spent when you make sales. In the best case, this would include your marketing costs once you have your marketing system in place and your marketing returns then become more predictable. It would also definitely include all subcontracted costs that you only incur when you make a sale. So for instance, if you had a subcontractor joiner who assembled the tables and you only paid him when a table is built and he charged£10 per table, then you'd include those costs in your gross margin percentage. So in this example that we've just gone through, there your gross margin percentage would come down to 30% from 40%. Because your costs are now£60 for the table themselves and£10 to have them built, so£70 in total from your£100 sale. Be careful here because if your joiner is actually on the payroll and you had to pay him regardless of how many tables you sold, then his or her cost would become or would be included, as I say, in the salaries in the business. The beautiful thing about your gross margin percentage is that once you've passed break-even point, this is the amount that your profit grows by every time. So every time you make a sale, it's all going to your bottom line, which is amazing. So think about it. Sometimes when I speak to business owners and they say I want to double my profit, they're thinking they need double the amount of customers, and they don't need double the amount of customers, they just need to understand what their break-even point is. And by going through these numbers systematically, you can really dig deep. So if you had a thousand leads coming through and you managed to make a hundred sales from those leads throughout your system, and you were saying, I want to double the business, and you were saying, Well, I need 200 coming through. A, it's good that you know the numbers, but and I'll tell you what, that'll put you a lot further forward than a lot of business owners out there. You may only need another 40 customers rather than another 100 customers to make the profit that you want. Why? Because you're breaking even, you know your break-even point, and that is liberating and very, very powerful and can help you spend more money on your marketing when you understand this. Number nine is gross profit. This is the amount of money you have left to fund your overhead salaries and profit after all your direct costs have been paid. Okay, the minute you go beyond, as I say, break-even, your gross profit goes straight to the bottom line because it's all a fixed cost and is covered. This means that once you get beyond break-even with the business, you can do a lot more. And this is why people you'll see that look relatively small are spending a fortune on marketing because they understand the numbers. They understand that once I've broken even, maybe I can only spend 10 pounds to acquire a customer before that, but all of a sudden I've hit break even, so all of my costs are covered. I can spend 20 pounds now, and that is liberating, and that will help you grow so much quicker. And that is something I help my clients to achieve and do as quickly as we possibly can. We fix the numbers, we work out the numbers, and then we act accordingly. And that is all about being a professional business owner. Because that breakeven point, you can do a lot more, you can spend more to get customers and grow. Once you're beyond break-even, you can be a lot more bullish in everything that you're pushing out there with regards to your marketing, and of course, acquire market share and more customers. Another number at number 10 is your overheads. These, of course, are your fixed costs. In other words, all the costs you have to pay, regardless of whether you sell a table or a thousand tables. This is where you'll include all your rent, any vehicle costs, utilities, but don't include your payroll costs here. We highlight them separately when it comes to the 12 numbers. Number 11 is salaries. There are people costs in any business. To begin with, you would include in here all the costs of everyone you pay, unless they only get paid when you make a sale, in which case they would be included in your gross margin percentage. Again, I would I would recommend that you download our PDF spreadsheet, have a little look for yourself so that you can see this in action. And of course, if you expect to be paid at the end of each week or month, regardless of how many sales you've made, then their cost would go there. And at number 12, we're there now, we're there. But I hope you're getting an understanding that this is all like a ladder, it all works together, and by tweaking and changing and looking at the numbers, you can really understand how you can grow your business. But at number 12, it's all about net profit before tax. This is what's actually left for you after you've paid all your costs. Now, what's important about all of the numbers is that they are all linked. For example, net profit plus salaries plus overheads equals gross profit. Your gross profit is a margin of your total revenue. Your total revenue comes from the number of sales you make and the average order value. Your sales will come from prospects, in turn, come from leads. Everything is linked and put together in a nice orderly package. And once you can understand this and you can really become an expert in your business and your numbers, oh my lord, you will set yourself free. I always liked what Donald Miller said about a business. He actually refers to any business as an aeroplane. The wings of the plane are the products and services because without products and services, you've got nothing to sell, you've got no lift. It's the wings that give the plane lift and get you in the air. Your marketing efforts and marketing spend are the thrusts that drive you forward, giving you the lift and getting the whole plane up and into the air. But your overheads are the body of the plane. They are just trying to bring your aeroplane back down to the ground. If you have tiny wings and a massive body of the plane, the business will never get in the air in the first place. Similarly, if you have a really big wing and your body gets bigger and it all starts coming down because you can't create enough thrust with your marketing to keep it in the air. If you have big wings, lots of thrust, and the appropriate size body, you hit the sweet spot and your plane can fly anywhere. The way to build significant growth in your business is to get a little bit better, right through the chain of the 12 numbers. So you improve all the time and keep moving forward. If you need help with this, then I'm more than willing to run sessions to help business owners to understand this. Again, I'll do a demo video and you can download a spreadsheet to see this for yourself. But it might take you a few times to listen to this to really understand it and go over it. It is so so important to get the 12 numbers in place, and then realistically, all you have to review are seven of those numbers each and every month. I track mine to see where we are, but I also have scorecards to help me know whether I'm on track with this. So if you're getting to a point where you want to plan out the future of your business, how much it can actually start to bring in profit-wise, how much and how you can start to give yourself more time and freedom to understand this, then we can help you with that. Do check out my website, markfitzgerald.com, and also feel free to book in a call where I can have a little chat with you about your business, what you might be struggling with at the moment, and see if we can point you in the right direction. I'm a massive believer in life and what goes around comes around, and I'm here and happy to help each and every person. Hope you've enjoyed this episode. Don't be scared of these numbers. You might have listened to this and thought you lost me halfway through. Go back over it again and listen to it. Download the spreadsheet, have a little look for yourself so that you can really get a bearing and an understanding of it. And I look forward to you joining me in the next episode next week. Take care and bye for now. I hope you've enjoyed this episode today. And if you are enjoying these and you need more help and assistance, then why not head over to my website mounting.com.