Episode 339 | The Profit Answer Man | Justin Goodbread
You built a $5 million business. You pay yourself well. On paper, you’re the success story your industry association features in its newsletter. Then someone asks what would happen if you sold tomorrow, and whether the payout would actually let you keep the life you already have. You realize you’ve never run that number. Neither has almost anyone else you know, and almost nobody finds out until the deal is already signed.
Justin Goodbread has built, scaled, and sold seven companies, including one financial services firm that went from an eight-figure to a nine-figure valuation in eighteen months. He spends his time now telling owners a version of a story most of them have never heard: the salary they’re proud of is not the number that decides whether they’re actually free.
The Problem: Your Real Spend Is Bigger Than Your Salary
The average service business owner targets around $250,000 a year in take-home pay. That’s the mean, according to Justin, across the thousands of owners he talks to on stages and in coaching calls each year. It sounds like a healthy number, and it is, until you count everything else the business is quietly funding.
The vehicle. The travel. The phone. The health insurance. Family members on the payroll. Justin’s estimate, drawn from years of watching owners’ books, is that the true spend running through a business paying its owner $250,000 a year is closer to $350,000 to $500,000. None of it feels like spending, because none of it shows up on a pay stub. It shows up as lifestyle. And lifestyle is invisible until someone asks you to replace it with cash.
The Wrong Path: Of Course You Built It This Way
None of this happened because an owner was careless. It happened because every accountant, every tax strategist, and every “smart owner” playbook says to run personal expenses through the business wherever legally possible. It’s not bad advice. Vehicles, travel, health insurance, all defensible. The problem isn’t the deductions. The problem is that nobody ever adds them back up and asks what they actually total, or what it would take to replace them without the business standing behind them.
You did what every advisor told you to do. It worked exactly as designed. It was never designed to answer the question of what your real number is.
The Insight: The Ten Million Dollar Number
Justin’s warning, delivered from stages to owners across the country, is blunt: most owners will need roughly $10 million in enterprise value to maintain their current lifestyle if they ever step away from the business. Not $10 million in take-home pay over their career. $10 million in what the business itself is worth, because that’s the pool that has to replace the salary, the benefits, and everything else quietly bundled into “how I live now.”
Most owners have never heard this number, because nobody in their life is incentivized to say it out loud. A financial advisor managing a modest 401(k) isn’t going to bring it up. A CPA filing last year’s taxes isn’t looking eighteen months ahead. The number sits there, unspoken, until an owner tries to sell and discovers the gap firsthand.
The Insight: Selling Doesn’t Automatically Solve It
This is where Rocky’s read on the conversation matters. Owners often assume a sale is the finish line: sell the business, take the payout, live comfortably. Rocky’s counter is simple math. If you sell your business for X, you end up with Y after taxes and fees, and Y rarely replaces your full salary and benefit package. The gap between X and the life you were living doesn’t close itself.
That doesn’t mean selling is wrong. It means selling isn’t automatically the answer, and treating it as one without running the numbers is how owners end up disappointed after the biggest transaction of their life.
The Insight: Growth Needs Different Things at Different Stages
Justin’s framework for revenue growth breaks into four distinct phases, and each one asks for something different. Below roughly $300,000 in revenue, it’s about hustle, pure effort to prove the concept works. Between $360,000 and $1 million, it becomes about systematization, building processes that don’t depend entirely on the owner. From $1 million to $3 million, the focus shifts to automation and autonomy, where the right technology and team members start removing the owner from the center of every decision. From $3 million to $10 million, it’s about leverage, building a structured team capable of running without the owner in the room.
Owners who try to run every stage the same way, usually the way that worked when they were smaller, end up as the bottleneck at the exact size where a bottleneck is most expensive.
The Insight: Removing Yourself Can Grow the Business
One of Justin’s more counterintuitive moves: he eliminated sales calls from his own company entirely. Instead of making it easy to reach him, he built friction on purpose, requiring prospects to spend hours engaging with content and a defined framework before any conversation happens. His team was worried it would shrink the business. Instead, revenue increased, and the quality of the clients coming through increased with it. Owners who assume “make it easier to buy” is always the answer to slow growth might be solving the wrong problem entirely.
Rocky’s Perspective
Here’s what I see when I sit down with a $5 million to $10 million owner: they’ve done everything right by the rules they were given, and they still can’t answer the one question that matters most, which is what it would actually take to walk away. My first conversation with a client is rarely about the business at all. It’s two hours understanding where they’ve been and where they actually want to go, because the business is supposed to serve that answer. It’s supposed to be your slave, not the other way around. Most owners have it backwards, and most of them don’t even realize it until someone puts the real numbers in front of them.
The One Thing
This week, add up everything the business currently pays for that isn’t your salary. Vehicle, travel, phone, insurance, anyone on payroll who’s family. Total it honestly. That number, added to what you already call your salary, is your real number. Once you know it, you can start asking the harder question: what would it actually take, in enterprise value, to replace it.
You built a business that looks like a success story from the outside. The real reason selling it won’t be enough is the same reason nobody warned you about the number in the first place: it was never designed to get measured, only lived in. Now you know where to start looking.
About Justin Goodbread
Justin Goodbread is a globally recognized business strategist, keynote speaker, and founder of Relentless Value Coaching, a membership and advisory program that equips service-based business owners to scale their companies to $10M+ enterprise value—without sacrificing their faith, family, or freedom.
Over the past two decades, Justin has started, scaled, and sold seven companies, including an RIA that reached eight-figure value in under four years. He built, scaled and exited seven different companies for 7-, 8-, and 9-figure values across industries, leveraging a proven framework of value acceleration, leadership development, and strategic delegation.
Links
Website: https://www.justingoodbread.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justingoodbread/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/justingoodbread
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justingoodbread/
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My podcast about living a richer more meaningful life: http://richersoul.com/
Music provided by Junan from Junan Podcast
Any financial advice is for educational purposes only and you should consult with an expert for your specific needs.