The 10 Levers

Where they come from

Alan Miltz counted 7. His Power of One framework, taught worldwide through Verne Harnish's Scaling Up, showed that a handful of financial variables move all the cash and profit in a business, and that a 1% or 1-day change in any of them compounds into real money: price, volume, cost of goods, overhead, and the 3 timing variables for receivables, inventory, and payables.

We work 10. After 18 years inside more than 1,000 businesses, 3 moves kept showing up that the original 7 either fold together or leave out:

• Marketing, split out of overhead. Overhead keeps today running. Marketing is a trade of today's profit for tomorrow's potential revenue. Cutting them with the same knife is how growth dies in the name of discipline.
• Unearned revenue. Deposits, retainers, getting paid before the work: customer money that funds the business instead of being chased by it. Most frameworks forget that your customers are the cheapest bank you will ever use.
• Debt and equity. Outside money, borrowed or raised on purpose, is a lever. Treating it as a failure keeps founders from pulling it when it is the right move.

The profit side

5 levers solve the profit problem:

1. Price. The only lever with no cost. Every dollar of a price increase that survives falls straight through to profit.
2. Volume. More units through the same machine. Only worth pulling when the machine makes money per unit; growing a lossmaker just loses money faster.
3. COGS / Cost of Sales. What each sale costs to deliver. Hidden inside it: Direct Labor, the sub-lever that decides whether the team pays for itself.
4. Overhead. What it costs to keep the doors open. Hidden inside it: the Owner's Piggy Bank™, the sub-lever most founders will not look at first.
5. Marketing. Today's profit traded for tomorrow's potential revenue. Managed as an investment with an expected return, never as a line item to cut on reflex.

The cash side

5 levers solve the cash flow problem:

6. AR: collect faster. Every day off your receivables is cash that was always yours arriving sooner.
7. Unearned Revenue. Deposits and pay-up-front terms. Getting paid early is better than getting paid more.
8. AP: pay strategically. Not "pay slower" on everything; pay on purpose. Some vendors are worth paying early. Some terms are worth renegotiating.
9. Inventory. Cash sitting on a shelf. Size it to the real cash window, not to the optimism.
10. Debt / Equity. Raise or restructure. Outside money buys time and capacity when the machine underneath it works.

How to read the map

One number. One shot clock. Ten levers. Every strategy you have ever been pitched, from the funnel to the hiring plan to the price increase, is a combination of these moves. That is what makes the map useful: when someone proposes a strategy, you can ask which levers it pulls, what each pull costs, and whether the business has the time to survive the pull. Time is measured in days, on the Cash Shot Clock™.

The map tells you what the moves are. It does not tell you which one your business should pull first, in what order, at what risk. That sequencing is a reading of one specific business: its margins, its clock, and what its customers will bear. The map is free. The order is the work, and a CFO Huddle™ is where it starts.