Revenue or Profit?
 

which is more important?

I vote for profit, its your cash after you paid all bills :)

If you need to ask that question, you shouldn't be operating your own business, but working for someone else.

Wait - are we talking about business or registering a domain name?

Gross Revenue - Expenses = Net/Profit

Profit for the win!

Profit :thumbsup

Profit, i cant eat based of revenue and negative balance :D

Neither. Cooking Books is where it's at.















One of the best is 10 GREAT DISHES OF THE WORLD by Robert Carrier

Cookies are more important than cookie dough.

http://lp1.pinkbike.org/p4pb1515829/p4pb1515829.jpg

what he says :)

turnover is irrelevant - profit is what counts :)

Profit

If you have revenue with low profit margin then you either need to optimize to try and reduce your operating expenses to increase your margin or increase your customer base where low profit margin x a shitload of people makes ya happy. More customers equals more support etc... so i would always aim to increase margin instead of turning into Walmart.

How can you have profit without revenue?

I guess that would make revenue more important. Dumb question anyway.

You can have revenue and no profit.

Personally I think that it depends where you are in the development cycle. Are you not profitable because you aren't creating enough revenue? Or are you not profitable because you are heavily reinvesting into new projects?

Profit is great but I would rather have $1M revenue monthly and $5K profit with heavy investing into current or new projects than $50K revenue monthly and $5K profit with no investment.

Profit today, this minute, is short-term thinking. Think about profit X 10 in 5 years.

Agreed. I'd take my company making $0 profit if all my employees are well paid and happy and we're stable vs my company making a small profit with everyone being paid little.

It all depends how you look at it and your situation.

:2 cents::2 cents::2 cents:

In general profit, but there are cases where growing revenue is better.

totally depends on your knowledge level

if the way the business is optimized is better then you know how to do

profits

if you see thing you can do fix wasting of money/resources revenue

i would buy a business that has crappy profits but great revenue if is see flaws that i know how to fix

simply because i can low ball offer the person because the profits suck, fix the problems and just rake in the cash.

You can optimize for revenue -- if you feel your specific product or more general company market position benefits best from being big -- or you can optimize for profit -- if, for example, you are looking to keep an organization lean and nimble. But that is an issue of what you optimize for. At the end of the day, unless you are winning through some complex combo of political favors and special business math, you have to have a profit.

I would say profit, but sometimes revanue is a life saver. Profit is not.

It also depends on if it's a new versus mature market. Today to some extent but definitely three years ago, the smart phone companies were correctly focused on growing revenue as an indicator of market share, not on profit. When I started on the web, many SEs were battling to grow to be the biggest. None were profitable, it was all about getting the biggest piece of a growing market. Google won of course, beating Altavista, Hotbot, Excite and the rest. NOW is the time for them to profit.

Except in a growth cycle or certain other special cases, I'd say definitely profit. Growth is certainly valuable, though, so I'd easily give up profit for now of I could trade it for fast growth.

Revenue. Volume talks and profit can come later.

Great post. :thumbsup

Cashflow is more important.

By order of importance:
1st - Current cashflow + potential future cashflow
2nd - Current profit + potential future profit
3rd - Current revenues+ potential future revenues

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Revenue

If you have the revenue, you can almost always do some tweaks, shop around for lower prices and make your own operation run more efficient. Always try to make the extra sale, as long as it covers it's own marketing costs and what not.

To those who say profit - what would you rather have? 1.000.000 revenue and 100 profit or 1000 revenue and 200 profit?
Its not so simple and like somenone said it depend on where you are in business development cycle.

well said.

I would prefer revenue with the path focus being to sell the business down the road for a large chunk of cash to someone who could integrate my business into theirs. My business may be unprofitable to me, but maybe not to google who could buy me out.

profit :thumbsup

net revenue v. gross profit ...

you cannot make up losses on revenue.