Why We Need to Look a Little Deeper:

Revenue, Profit and the Reality of Cashflow

We’ve all heard the phrase “Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cashflow is king.” Most business owners nod along, repeat it to their teams, and then quietly go back to obsessing over the wrong numbers. It’s a great saying, but unless we truly understand why it’s true, it becomes just another slogan on the wall—nice to look at but not actually changing the way we run the business.

The truth is this: to build a better business, we have to train ourselves to look deeper than the surface. Revenue, profit and cashflow each reveal something different about the health of the business, but only one of them shows us reality.

Revenue: The Ego Metric

Let’s start with revenue. Revenue is exciting. It’s the big number you tell people about at networking events, the number you post online, the number you use to convince yourself that things are going well.

But here’s the honest truth: revenue is an ego metric.

It’s built around emotion. It’s “look at how much I can sell.” It feeds that very human part of us that wants to feel successful, important, bigger than last year. There’s nothing wrong with revenue—it matters—but if you only focus on revenue, you’re focusing on the story, not the substance.

And that’s why so many businesses with “impressive” turnover are struggling. They’re measuring the wrong thing.

Profit: The Logic Metric

Profit is very different. Profit isn’t emotional—it’s logical. It forces us to ask harder questions:

• What’s actually left after we’ve delivered the value?
• Are we efficient?
• Are we pricing correctly?
• Are we managing costs properly?

Profit tells you if your business model makes sense. But here’s the challenge: logic requires effort. It requires time, critical thinking, analysis, honesty. You can’t bluff profit. You can’t cover it with enthusiasm or “busy days.” You have to sit with the numbers and actually understand them.

And because this requires more cognitive load, many business owners subconsciously avoid it.

Cashflow: The Reality Metric

Then there’s cashflow—the one metric you simply cannot hide from. Cashflow is reality. It is what is actually going into the bank and what is actually going out. It’s the truth of the business laid bare:

• Are you getting paid fast enough?
• Are you spending more than you should?
• Do you have enough left to invest, survive or grow?

Cashflow is uncomfortable because it’s real-time truth. Human beings, by default, don’t like reality unless they’re forced into it. We prefer emotion (revenue) or logic (profit) to the real-world consequences of cash in the bank.

And that’s exactly why cashflow is king.

The Discipline to Focus on Reality

Here’s the leadership lesson: you have to discipline yourself to focus on cashflow first.
Not because the other metrics don’t matter—but because cashflow is the one that will keep you in business long enough to fix everything else.

When you train yourself to dig deeper, to look past the surface-level numbers, and to confront the truth of the bank account, you build a stronger, more resilient business. You start making decisions from reality, not ego. And that’s where real growth—and real freedom—begins.

By Andy Walter

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