How I Went From Losing £80,000 a Month to Making £80,000 a Month — in 90 Days

I walked away from a corporate career with a big team and a million-dollar budget. I thought starting my own business would be easy — I'd managed budgets bigger than most companies' annual revenue. I'd hired and fired and negotiated contracts and closed deals.

I was going to be brilliant at entrepreneurship.

I was wrong about almost everything.

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The Franchise That Should Have Worked

I bought a franchise. Wall spikes and electric fencing — domestic and commercial security. The territory I chose had a genuinely high crime rate, which meant genuine demand. No artificial market. Real customers who wanted the thing I was going to sell.

It looked like a slam dunk on paper.

Sales came in quickly. Turns out when you promote security products in a high-crime area and people actually need them, they buy. But here's the problem nobody tells you about franchises: you can't deliver the thing and find the next sale at the same time.

So I hired. Eight guys. Three vans. Insurance. Tools. Fuel. Each salesman's wages. Each installer's wages. Vehicle maintenance. Business insurance on top of vehicle insurance. Phone contracts for all eight of them — because I provided the phones. Materials. Delivery costs.

Every single month, that machinery had to turn. And every single month, the revenue coming in wasn't enough to cover what the machinery was costing to run.

I was busy. The team was busy. The phone was ringing. We were shipping jobs out the door.

But on the bottom line, I was losing money.

This is the trap that kills most growing businesses: you're busy but broke.

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The £100,000-a-Month Lifeline

The one smart thing I'd done during my corporate career was buy property. Multiple properties. So I had equity sitting there, built up over years of a proper salary.

I started drawing that equity. Mortgage after mortgage. Pumping over £100,000 a month into the business just to keep it breathing.

The advertising budget kept climbing. Facebook ads. Google ads. Trying everything. But I had no idea what was actually working and what was just burning cash. I was throwing money at the problem and hoping the problem would go away.

This is the bit most business owners never admit out loud: I was spending money I didn't have on things I couldn't measure.

And because I came from corporate — where budgets are managed by finance teams and you don't think about individual line items — I thought this was just what business ownership looked like. You invest upfront, you lose money for a few years, then eventually it turns profitable. That's how the corporate world works, right?

Except in corporate, someone else is funding your losses.

I was funding mine with home equity. That doesn't last forever.

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The Three Words That Changed Everything

Full absorption costing.

I'd heard the term before. I'd avoided it because even hearing it made me feel inadequate. It sounded complicated. Corporate. Painful. And I knew exactly why it was painful: it would show me, with perfect clarity, exactly where every pound was going.

Which meant admitting I had no idea what I was doing.

But I was haemorrhaging money. Running out of equity to raid. So I had no choice.

I sat down with a Windows phone — one of the first ones that could actually run Excel — and I started tracking everything.

All that advertising spend focused on the franchise area. All that brand alignment talk. Wasted. The real customers were in other parts of the city altogether.

But that was just the beginning.

I created two tabs on that spreadsheet. The first tracked every single overhead cost: van costs (purchase, depreciation, maintenance, fuel, insurance), salaries (all eight of them), business insurance, office rent, my own car and fuel, phone contracts for the whole team, tools (expensive machinery for each installer), materials sourcing costs.

I added them up and divided by 160. That's your ceiling — the number of billable hours per installer per month, working five days a week, assuming no admin time, no downtime, no waste.

That gave me a number: how much overhead cost per hour of actual work.

The second tab tracked every single job. Estimated hours at quote stage. Actual hours to complete. Every component cost. Every delivery cost. Delivery distance, fuel, time in the van.

Then I worked backwards from the price I'd quoted.

Quote price, minus material costs, minus delivery costs, minus overhead per hour, equals actual net margin.

That spreadsheet showed me something brutal: I was underpricing almost every job. Most of them had negative margins when you actually counted the full cost to deliver them.

Some jobs looked profitable at first glance — decent material margins. But when you added the delivery cost, the time in the van, the overhead allocation, the profit had vanished.

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From Bleeding to Breathing

Once I could see the real numbers, everything changed.

I stopped accepting jobs below 50% net margin. Then I tested what happened when I pushed to 55%. The phone kept ringing. Pushed to 60%. Still ringing. 65%.

This is price elasticity — most people have no idea where their breaking point actually is because they've never tested it. You increase prices a little at a time and watch for the cliff edge where customers stop calling.

Turns out my cliff edge was way higher than I thought.

We got to a point where we had three weeks of fully booked paid work lined up. Large deposits upfront. Those deposits covered all the materials and delivery costs. By the time the job was complete, we'd already been paid for the hard parts.

Every single job went through that spreadsheet. Estimated, quoted, tracked. If the margin wasn't high enough, we didn't do it. This was the hardest part — saying no to revenue. But saying yes to the wrong jobs is what got me here in the first place.

The phone calls changed. Instead of "Can you do it for less?" I started getting "When can you start?" People who wanted the job done right. People who trusted that if we were quoting a price, there was a reason.

The team's morale changed too. They weren't grinding through unprofitable jobs. They were doing good work, getting paid well for it, and feeling the difference. I increased their salaries — actually rewarded them for the turnaround.

After three months of this, the numbers looked like this: average net margin across all jobs was 67%. We had a waiting list. Money was coming in. Orders were happening. The business actually felt sustainable for the first time.

Everything changed because I finally understood the real cost of doing business. Not the fantasy cost. The actual cost.

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And Then It Was Taken Away

Just as I'd turned it around — just as the business was actually working — the franchise owner lost his mind.

I'd expanded the product range. Customers kept asking for palisade fencing. So we started doing it. On-site fabrication. We'd construct the frames, plant the posts, spray anti-rust coating and enamel topcoat with industrial spraying equipment running off petrol generators.

We were brilliant at it. The margins were insane. We had 60%+ market share in the city for security fencing. We weren't a franchise anymore — we were a local business that happened to have bought a franchise license.

The owner sent a cease and desist on my most profitable month.

The irony was painful: the one thing I'd done right — actually understanding my costs and pricing accordingly — had generated enough profit to expand beyond the franchise agreement. And that expansion was exactly what made the business worth shutting down.

Any rational franchise owner would have said, "You've built this into something special. What if I took a cut of the profit for the products outside the original scope?" We'd both be richer.

Instead, he couldn't handle that I'd made something work better than his original model.

The game was over. The business closed.

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Why This Matters to You

This fencing business was started in what everyone called a saturated market. A franchise no less — which everyone knows is a terrible idea. My friends said I'd have to sell cheap to get customers. I'd have to compete on price.

I proved them wrong. Not because I'm brilliant. Because I stopped guessing and started knowing.

Here's what I learned: every small business has the same invisible problem. Whether you're a tradesperson, a service provider, a sole trader, or a small team — you don't know your true cost per hour.

You know what you charge. You know roughly what your materials cost. But you don't know what it actually costs to deliver that work when you add in everything — your time, your team's time, your van, your insurance, your tools, your admin overhead.

And if you don't know that number, you're guessing on price. And if you're guessing on price, you're either leaving money on the table or you're haemorrhaging it.

Full absorption costing isn't some complicated corporate accounting exercise. It's just knowing where your money goes so you can make more of it.

It's the difference between a business that's busy but broke, and a business that's actually profitable.

In my next piece, I'll walk you through exactly how to set this up for your own business — step by step. Even if spreadsheets make you nervous. Even if you've never done this before. Because the best businesses aren't run by people with MBAs. They're run by people who decided to stop guessing and start knowing.