10/19/2026
Business owners, do you ever work backward from how many extra jobs your marketing would need to bring in?
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Quick made-up example. Say you spend $6,000 a year on marketing, and each extra job leaves you about $1,500 after materials, labor and other direct costs. $6,000 ÷ $1,500 = 4 extra jobs just to cover it.
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The thing that trips people up is using the job price instead of what's left after the work is paid for. A $5,000 job that leaves you $1,500 only counts as $1,500 toward the marketing. And four jobs is break-even on the marketing, assuming they're genuinely new jobs that came from it. It's not profit yet.
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I'm Nick. I build websites and do local search work for a living. I'm based in New York, but I work with businesses in other states too, and this is usually where I start: figure out what a customer is worth first, then decide what's actually worth fixing.
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Curious how other owners here think about it. Do you work out what a customer is worth before signing up for marketing, or is it more of a gut call?