- Customers
- Goods/Services
- Cost of Goods/Services

Before thinking about strategy to attract more customers customers we need to understand the two main drivers which leads to a customer.

- How many people know about your business and the good/services that you provide?
- How many of them can you attract to become your customers?

Once a small business has acquired a customer, the obvious next step is how much money do we make from this customer. To understand this we need to understand the two drivers of revenue or gross income.

- How much does the good/services sell for?
- How many good/services does the customer buy?

Another way of seeing this is:

- How much value in a basket of good/services?
- How many times does the customer purchase in a given period?

In short, to find out how much revenue is generated per customer we need to know how much and how many.

Lastly, once a small business finds out how much revenue each customer is bringing for the business they need to understand their cost of acquiring the customer, goods/services. The driver for this is:

Profit Margin

Obviously the higher the better, but businesses in certain industry group or businesses that sell certain type of goods/services will tend to have different margin. auto-manufacturers have lower margins compared to online business selling ebooks.

Summary

The five key drivers to small business profits are:

- Leads
- Conversion
- Revenue per Transaction
- Number of Transactions
- Profit Margins