What the Best Are Doing Right Now: Lessons from Top-Performing Businesses

In today’s unpredictable economic environment, business owners are asking a critical question: What are the top performers doing right now?

In a recent episode of Profitability Playbook: The Simple Numbers Podcast, hosts Brandon Gray and Mike Maxson unpack that question by walking through the Profit & Loss (P&L) statement and sharing what they consistently see among the highest-performing companies they advise.

The takeaway is clear: the best businesses are not guessing. They are disciplined, focused, and relentlessly attentive to the fundamentals that actually drive profitability.

Here’s what separates the best from the rest:

1. They Get Creative About Revenue, but Strategic About Focus

Top performers are not passive about growth. They are actively listening to the market, adjusting their messaging, and finding creative ways to reach ideal customers.

Sometimes that creativity looks surprisingly simple.

One example shared in the episode involved a client who went back to an old-school tactic: printing flyers and personally dropping them off at professional office buildings. The result? Two new clients almost immediately.

The lesson is not that flyers are the future of marketing. It’s that the best companies are willing to try what works, even if it feels unconventional or outdated, as long as it aligns with market demand.

At the same time, top performers are narrowing their focus. In stronger economic times, businesses can afford to sell many products or services. In tighter markets, the best companies consolidate and double down on what sells best.

They ask:

• What does the market actually want right now?

• Which offerings consistently convert?

• Where are we getting the strongest return on effort?

Then they focus there intentionally.

2. They Obsess Over Gross Margin Dollars, Not Just Revenue

You’ve probably already heard the saying “revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is king.”

Top performers take this seriously. Rather than chasing top-line revenue for its own sake, the best businesses focus on gross margin dollars, the actual dollars left after direct costs that fuel everything else in the business.

This means prioritizing high-margin products and services, regularly reviewing pricing, and adjusting quickly when vendor costs or market conditions change.

A dangerous pattern Brandon and Mike see too often is slow margin erosion. A company might move from a 65% margin to 62%, then 59%, and suddenly find itself at 56% with profitability wiped out.

The best businesses prevent this by having regular margin reviews, clear processes for evaluating margins by service, product, client, or team, and leadership that keeps its ear to the ground on pricing and cost changes.

3. They Make Direct Labor Flexible

Labor is one of the highest costs on the P&L and one of the most misunderstood.

Top performers break labor into two categories:

• Direct labor: people delivering the product or service

• Management labor: administrative, leadership, and back-office roles

The biggest difference among top performers is how they manage direct labor.

Rather than treating it as a fixed cost with rigid schedules, they make it flexible. Staffing levels move up and down with gross margin dollars. That may mean shorter workweeks during slow periods, increased hours on days of strong demand, and adjusting staffing based on real-time margin performance.

The flexibility protects profitability when the market becomes erratic, and right now, it is.

4. They Right-Size Management and Protect Highest-Value Work

High-performing companies are also intentional about management labor.

They do not over-hire management “just in case,” unless they are growing rapidly (15–20% annually). Instead, they size management to current contribution margins, hold management accountable to financial performance, and ensure leaders are spending time on their highest and best use.

A recurring recommendation from the episode is time tracking, even for owners and senior leaders. When leaders track their time, they often discover they are spending hours on tasks that could be delegated to lower-cost labor, contractors, or offshore resources.

Freeing leaders to focus on strategy, pricing, people, and clients is a major driver of profitability.

5. They Keep Operating Expenses Tight (and Review Them Often)

Top performers do not waste time on cosmetic cost-cutting. Switching office supplies or trimming trivial expenses will not change the economic reality of a business.

Instead, they focus on high-impact areas such as software subscriptions and unused licenses, insurance, facilities and recurring dues, and marketing spend tied to real results.

When operating expenses exceed 40% of revenue, profitability becomes very difficult. Best-in-class businesses often operate closer to 35–36%.

6. They Track Marketing ROI Relentlessly

One of the biggest shifts discussed in the episode is how long marketing now takes to convert. Where leads once converted in three to six months, many businesses now see sales cycles of 18–24 months.

Because of this, the best companies are obsessive about tracking marketing channel spend, gross margin generated by marketing, and conferences, sponsorships, and events that actually produce clients.

They cut what doesn’t work, even if it’s popular or familiar, and stay patient with what does.

Final Thoughts

Top performers are not doing anything magical. They are focused, disciplined, willing to adapt, and relentless about reviewing numbers that matter. They understand their P&L, manage margins aggressively, keep labor flexible, and refuse to let inefficiencies go unnoticed. In uncertain markets, this discipline is the difference between surviving and leading.

If you’d like support in incorporating these practices and strategies into your operations to drive sustainable profit, contact us to get started.