8 to 15 percent. That's what's walking out the door.

TL;DR: Most founders try to solve margin pressure with more revenue. But the gap between what your business earns and what it's actually worth is rarely a growth problem. It's a leakage problem. Value drains out quietly through pricing drift, undisciplined discounting, vendor contracts nobody re-reads, and procurement decisions made by habit instead of analysis. Growth adds complexity. Eliminating leakage adds margin with almost no risk. The tightest businesses, not the fastest-growing ones, command the best multiples.

When margins compress or growth stalls, the founder's instinct is almost always the same: sell more. Add a product line. Open a new channel. Hire another salesperson. Push the top line harder and assume the bottom line will follow.

Sometimes it works. More often, it masks the real problem. Because for most businesses between $1M and $10M in EBITDA, the gap between current performance and premium valuation isn't a revenue gap. It's a leakage gap.

Value is quietly draining out of the business, not through any single dramatic mistake, but through dozens of small, invisible ones that compound over time. And the founder can't see them because they've been there so long they look like normal operating conditions.

Leakage isn't a line item on your P&L. It's the accumulation of decisions that were once reasonable but haven't been revisited.

It shows up in pricing drift, where your rates haven't kept pace with the market because nobody owns the pricing function and the last real analysis was two years ago. It shows up in discounting behavior, where your sales team has quietly expanded the range of what's "acceptable" to close a deal, and the average discount has crept from 5 percent to 12 percent without anyone tracking the trend.

It shows up in vendor contracts that auto-renewed three times without a competitive bid, in procurement that's fragmented across departments with no central visibility, and in service agreements where the scope expanded but the price never did.

None of these are catastrophic individually. But together, they represent a meaningful percentage of your EBITDA that's walking out the door every month. In my experience, the number is typically somewhere between 8 and 15 percent of recoverable margin, hiding in plain sight.

Here's the part most founders miss. Growth doesn't fix leakage. Growth amplifies it.

Every new product line, every new customer segment, every new geography adds complexity. And complexity creates more surface area for leakage to occur. More pricing decisions that aren't centrally governed. More vendor relationships that aren't benchmarked. More contracts that nobody re-reads.

The founder who grows from $3M to $6M in revenue without tightening the underlying structure often discovers that their EBITDA didn't double. It might have gone up 40 percent, or 60 percent, because the leakage scaled right alongside the revenue. They worked twice as hard to capture a fraction of the value they created.

A sophisticated buyer sees this immediately. They don't look at your top line and get excited. They look at the gap between your revenue and your effective margin and start calculating how much value is recoverable. If the answer is "a lot," that recovery becomes their return, not yours.

They're buying your leakage at a discount and capturing it post-close.

The businesses that command the highest multiples aren't always the fastest-growing. They're the ones where every dollar of revenue converts to margin as efficiently as possible. Where pricing is intentional, discounting is governed, vendor spend is benchmarked, and contracts reflect current value rather than historical convenience.

This is a fundamentally different discipline than growth. Growth asks: "How do I make more?" Tightness asks: "How much of what I'm already making am I actually keeping?" The second question is less exciting. It's also dramatically more valuable per unit of effort, and it carries almost no risk.

You don't need to hire anyone. You don't need to open a new market. You don't need to bet on a new product. You just need to look at the money that's already flowing through your business and ask whether the structure is capturing it as well as it should.

The founder who chases growth to solve a margin problem is running faster on the same treadmill. The founder who eliminates leakage is changing the economics of the machine itself.

Leakage is one of those problems that feels too mundane to prioritize. It's not a strategy conversation. It's not a vision exercise. It's the boring, uncomfortable work of looking at your pricing, your discounting, your contracts, and your procurement and asking whether each one still makes sense.

But that boring work is exactly what separates a business that earns well from a business that's worth a premium. A buyer will do this audit in their first 90 days of ownership. The question is whether you capture that value, or they do.

— Roland

Everyone’s arguing about which AI tool is “best.”

That’s mostly noise. I’ve seen people spend more time comparing tools than actually building anything with them.

The reality is, most of these platforms are already good enough to get real work done.

The edge doesn’t come from picking the perfect tool. It comes from actually using one consistently.

Want to see how to actually get value from AI tools? Watch the video below.