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Fix The Machines In Your Business First!
Stephen Edwards
April 07, 2025
Table of Contents
Hey everyone, Stephen Edwards here from Gro Profit First!
🕒 Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
🛠️ Fix the Machines First – Before You Gro!
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Most business owners chase new growth without realising their internal machines — Finance, Sales, Delivery, Marketing — are broken or barely running.
In this week's article, I break down:
🔧 Why your business is a series of machines (and why some are secretly holding you back).
🔍 How fixing the Finance Machine first creates real momentum and profit.
🚀 How to simplify business growth by fixing problems at the root, not just chasing more sales.
Why read this?
If you ever feel stuck, overwhelmed, or like you're working harder but not earning more, this might be the real reason why.
Instead of spinning plates, I’ll show you how to fix the machine that fuels everything else — your finances — and unlock sustainable, profitable growth.
👉 Dive in to learn why fixing (not growing) might be the smartest move you make this year.
I have a theory.
Rather than looking for a new way to grow your business...
You need to fix the machines first.
You have various "machines" in your business, whether you know it or not.
For example, you have a machine for how you deliver your services — from the moment a customer signs up, to planning the work or order, allocating resources, and ultimately delivering what you said you were going to do.
Let's call this the Delivery Machine.
You may in fact have multiple delivery machines for your different products and services.
(Already you can see the benefit of simplifying your services and products, so you need fewer "machines" to deliver them. More on that later...)
You will also have a Marketing Machine, a Sales Machine, a Customer Service Machine, a HR Machine, an Admin Machine, and a Finance Machine.
Today, I’m going to focus on the Finance Machine, because it’s the foundation of everything.
Simplifying Your Business Growth
By breaking down your business into a series of "machines", we simplify what it means to build a business.
The phrase build a business often brings to mind things like revenue size, the number of team members, or the size of your office. The issue with this is that it focuses on outputs — in other words, the results of what you’ve built.
In reality, in order to generate a certain level of revenue, you need all of the machines mentioned above running at a certain level of effectiveness.
The biggest anchor holding most businesses back is that their machines are:
Poorly designed,
Not maintained,
Or completely broken.
This usually happens because business owners complicate their business and run it on emotion instead of logic.
When you think of your business as one big machine made up of smaller machines, you can simplify business growth.
Fix the machine first.
The biggest challenge I see with business owners is the overwhelm from having so many things to focus on at once.
But if you can identify the machine causing you the most problems — the one having the biggest negative impact — you can finally focus your energy and move your business forward with serious momentum.
Think of your own car (or one you’ve had in the past).
The car as a whole is a machine, but within it you have smaller machines: the chassis system, the tyre pressure system, the exhaust system, the engine, and so on.
As business owners, we are often trying to make the "car" go faster (like the famous Olympic strategy: “Make the boat go faster”), without fixing what’s broken underneath.
The first machine you must fix is your Finance Machine.
At Gro Profit First Accountants, we call this your Finance Department.
Most business owners are too busy doing the thing they do for their customers day in and day out to truly understand their Finance Machine (often referred to as knowing your numbers).
I’ve seen businesses turning over more than £1m and barely making any profit — purely because they don’t know their margins.
I’ve seen trade businesses triple their revenue... and end up paying themselves less!
If you want to know how to fix and build a Finance Machine that enables you to create a profitable, sustainable business — one that also gives you, the owner, the lifestyle you truly want for your family — just drop me a message at [email protected].
Want some help?
4 Ways I can help you.
Book an Owners Pay Accelerator Call with Steve if you want to maximise your own pay for 2025 to apply for the programme HERE
If you are not a client, then you can book a call HERE so we can learn more about your business.
If you are a client and we don’t already help you with Profit First, email me via [email protected] to arrange a chat about the Profit First System and how it can increase your cash balance and profits (guaranteed)
Get some tax tips from my TikTok HERE
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