The first stage of The Profit Path is Feel It.

You know something's wrong but you can't name it.

You're busy every.single.day. The phone rings, sales are up, and the whole town thinks you're killing it. So how come you’re still checking the bank balance before you order supplies? You're trying to figure out how can a business this busy be this broke?

So you try to do impossible math at midnight.
And when your neighbour congratulates you on a booming business. You smile.

But secretly, you feel like a failure.

You didn't fail. You're not bad with money, you're not lazy, and you're not missing some gene every other business owner has.

You're busy but broke.

When you’re busy but broke, the profit you’re looking for is usually hiding in the business you already have. In numbers nobody ever taught you to read or use. And you definitely won't find it with more customers, more marketing or more hours. In fact, more sales usually make profit problems worse (but that's a conversation for a little further down the road).

The feel it stage is where almost everybody is when they find us. And once you’re finished this stage, the frustration you have stops being a feeling you can't explain and becomes something you're pretty sure you can fix.