Lesson 9 · Do & interpret
No new data and no new export. Eight minutes with the figures you already have, and you will know how much money is sitting in the customers you already own.
7 minutes · Right-to-Grow worksheet · Artifact: the size of your prize
It is one subtraction and one multiplication, and the figure comes straight off the curve you already built in lesson 7.
A peak of 126% is a 26% prize. A peak of 150% is half your earnings again. A peak of 100% means the tail is giving nothing back and your money is somewhere else entirely.
This figure deliberately contains nothing about your gap. Your gap is already the other axis of the scorecard, and a measure that quietly repeats it would tell you the same thing twice and call it two findings.
The highest point your curve reached, as a percentage of profit — 109%, 126%, whatever it was.
A peak of 126% gives a 26% prize. That is the share of your earnings the rest of the book is handing back.
26% of $9.8M is $2.55M a year. Put it in dollars — that is the version that gets attention in a board meeting.
Your climb is your multiple minus 100%. Both are now a share of current earnings, so they compare directly.
The worksheet
Three fields you already have answers to — your peak, your current earnings, and your multiple. It returns your prize in dollars, its size, and your coverage.
Your result
You have done the work. Enter your email and I will send your prize in percent and in dollars, your coverage, and the one-paragraph read of what it means for your list — as a page you can put in front of your board.
Read this as a size, not as a grade. A large number does not mean the business has been run badly and a small one does not mean it has been run well. It tells you how big this opportunity is and therefore where it sits on your list.
| The size of your prize | Reading | Where it goes on your list |
|---|---|---|
| 30% or more | Large | Top of the list, ahead of anything else you are considering. Nothing available to you is cheaper than this, because you already own the customers. This should be the most encouraging number in the course, not the most alarming. |
| 15% – 30% | Meaningful | Near the top, and big enough to deserve its own workstream with a name and an owner against it. Do not let it become everybody’s job, which is nobody’s. |
| Under 15% | Small | Real money and still worth collecting, but not your most pressing problem. Look harder at your pricing corridor and your cost to serve before you spend a year working the tail. |
The size does not change the order. Collect the prize before you spend to grow — not because growth has to be earned like a merit badge, but because paying to acquire more customers before you fix what the current ones cost you means buying more of the problem.
Second read
Under 20% and the climb is mostly outside the book you have. Above 50% and the tail carries most of it. Above 100% — which happens, and more often than people expect — the prize inside your existing customers is larger than your entire requirement, and you could reach your number without winning a single new account.
Treat it as a ceiling rather than a promise. It assumes the cost of serving that tail is genuinely avoidable, and some of it never is; some cost stays in the building after the customer leaves. But it answers the question lesson 4 said decides everything after it: is this a margin problem or a growth problem?
The size of your prize ÷ your climb (your multiple − 100%)
Earning $9.8M on 7.0% margins, needing to reach $19.6M in five years. Its curve peaked at 126%, so 26% of current earnings — $2.55M a year — was sitting in its own customer book.
A meaningful prize and a demanding number. On the scorecard that is Day Zero, and it is the position most of the businesses I am called into are actually in.
Read the coverage figure carefully, because it cuts both ways. The prize is a quarter of the climb, so subtraction alone will not get them there — they genuinely need growth as well. But $2.55M a year is the cheapest money on their list, and spending to win new accounts before collecting it means paying to acquire more of the same problem.
The order is not optional. Take the prize, then grow into it. Reverse those and you spend two years getting further behind while looking busy.
The same arithmetic, a very different business
Now take a distributor whose curve peaked at 150% against a 1.3× target. A 50% prize against a 30% climb, which is coverage of 167%. The money sitting inside his existing customers is larger than his entire requirement. He could reach his number without winning one new account.
A CEO told his peak was 150% will usually hear it as bad news, and spend the year opening territories instead. It is the opposite. That is why this lesson insists the figure is a size and not a grade — the same number read correctly moves the biggest and cheapest opportunity he has to the top of his list.
Bring all four numbers to lesson 10. It assembles them into a single verdict.
Next — lesson 10
