We need to make more money.
That's the honest truth sitting here between us. We use a lot of language in the contract cleaning industry. Culture, purpose, transformation, innovation. All of it matters. But there is a fundamental truth holding up the house. All business exists to produce a return.
York Building Services has worked with Crews & co. for four years. Eric Crews founded the firm and built its Growth Method around exactly this idea. I asked Eric to contribute to this article because it's a lesson worth revisiting, no matter where you are in building your business.
How CEOs Lose the Thread
It's not that leaders stop caring about profit. What changes, gradually and without anyone naming it, is the assumption that profit will follow. Get the culture right, grow the team, win the contracts, and the margins will take care of themselves.
They won't. Not on their own. Once profit becomes something you expect rather than something you actively drive, the organization follows that lead. Revenue becomes something you influence. Profit becomes something you explain at year-end, and by then, it is too late to do anything about it.
I asked Eric where he sees this discipline break down most often.
The moment a CEO starts managing complexity instead of driving outcomes, profit becomes something they react to instead of something they actively manage.
We see this a lot. A company reaches $5 million, $10 million, or $25 million. The team grows. The org chart gets more complicated. The CEO spends more time in meetings about people, process, culture, and internal issues.
None of that is wrong. In fact, those things matter. But they only create value if they connect back to the bigger question: are we building a more profitable, more scalable, more valuable business?
Revenue, profit, and enterprise value are not outcomes you discover at year-end. They are targets you set, plan against, and measure every 90 days. That is why the operating rhythm matters. Strategy, people, finance, and execution all need to point at the same financial targets.
Otherwise, the business gets busier without necessarily becoming better.
Profit Isn't the Opposite of Purpose
There is a narrative that lingers in our industry. That prioritizing profit comes at the expense of people, or culture, or long-term thinking. Our experience at York tells us something different.
Profit is what lets you take care of people well. It gives you room to invest in training, systems, and the leadership your team deserves. The companies in this industry that hold their standards year after year, that have real pride in the work, are not operating from scarcity. They are operating from strength.
I asked Eric how he advises CEOs to evaluate initiatives like culture and growth without losing sight of the bottom line.
Every major initiative should answer one question:
Does this help us grow revenue, improve margin, increase enterprise value, or strengthen our ability to execute? That is not cynical. That is clarity.
Culture matters because strong culture helps retain better people, and better people produce better outcomes. Process matters because it reduces friction and improves execution. Growth matters because scale can create leverage. Finance matters because it tells you whether the strategy is actually working.
Where CEOs get into trouble is treating these as separate tracks and assuming they will eventually show up in the financial results. They usually do not.
You have to connect major initiatives back to your three-year targets, quarterly priorities, and weekly scorecard. Otherwise, strategy becomes activity. And activity without measurable impact eventually becomes overhead.
The Questions That Tell the Truth
In our cleaning and facility services world, margins are earned and the details matter. We know what it is to be busy, growing, contracts signed, team expanding, and still feel that pressure underneath. When the financial fundamentals are right, everything else gets better. The team feels it. Clients experience it. The work itself rises.
Here is a simple self-audit worth sitting with:
- Are you pricing with intention, or with hope?
- Are you putting resources behind the work that actually returns value?
- Are you letting inefficiencies settle in because they are familiar?
- Are you growing in ways that actually convert to cash?
If any one of those gives you pause, that is where the money is going.
The Constant Correction
Restaurateur Danny Meyer noticed something about his dining rooms. No matter how carefully his team set the tables, the salt shaker always drifted off center. Guests moved it, servers bumped it, it just wandered. His standard was simple: whenever anyone walked past a table, they put it back. No announcement, no blame, no big reset. Just a quiet, constant correction back to where it belonged.
Running a profitable business works the same way. Pricing drifts. Costs creep. A contract that made sense two years ago stops making sense and nobody says anything. The discipline doesn't fail all at once. It wanders, a little at a time, until the numbers tell you something is wrong.
The job of the CEO is not to fix it once. It is to keep putting it back. Back to intentional pricing. Back to clean financials. Back to a real plan with a real number attached to it.
Culture, vision, innovation. All of it matters, and all of it works better when it sits on a foundation of profit. A business exists to generate a return. The CEO exists to make sure it does.