83% of small business owners live check to check because profit gets whatever is left, which is usually nothing. Flip the equation. Enter your monthly income and get your allocation plan.
Operating expenses take whatever remains, which is the discipline: 50% is what is left to run the business efficiently. Defaults are the targets we teach; adjust to set your own TAPs.
A cash management system that flips the normal equation. Instead of Sales minus Expenses equals Profit, where profit is whatever survives the month, you run Sales minus Profit equals Expenses: take profit off the top of every dollar that comes in, fund owner's pay and taxes next, and run the business on what remains. Profit becomes a habit instead of a year-end surprise.
The defaults above (10% profit, 25% owner's comp, 15% taxes, 50% OpEx) are the working targets we teach. Your current allocation percentages probably look different, and that is fine. Set the targets, then move a few percentage points per quarter. Trying to jump to the targets overnight is how agents quit the system in month two.
Twice a month, on the 10th and the 25th. The rhythm matters as much as the percentages: every dollar that landed since the last allocation gets split into the four accounts on those two dates, no exceptions. Ten minutes, twice a month, and you always know exactly how healthy the business is.
It is your shareholder reward. Many owners take a quarterly distribution and keep a reserve; what you do not do is raid it for operating expenses. The business exists to serve you. Pay yourself first, and the OpEx constraint forces the efficiency every operator eventually learns the hard way.
The full Profit First install, with the account setup and the quarterly rhythm, is a module inside The Vertical Advantage.
See the program