The Numbers You Won't Share

"Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants."
— Louis D. Brandeis

There is a conversation I have with every new client in the first quarter we work together.

We sit down to define their long-term goal. What do we want to achieve. How will we know when we get there.

The answers vary. Some teams measure it in impact, the number of units delivered or families served or homes built. Others measure it in reputation, or quality, or reach. Many name a revenue number.

Profit rarely comes up first. But it comes up. Revenue and profit are the one language every business shares.

The room agrees on a number. People lean forward.

Then, sometimes, someone says it.

"We can't share those numbers with the team."

Nobody argues. Heads nod. The conversation moves on, the way a room moves past something everyone already agrees about.

They assume the same two things. That people will feel taken advantage of when profits are high. Or that the company is in trouble when they are low.

So they settle on something safer. A number that points in roughly the same direction as profit.

Either way, the team is left to guess.

Nobody asks whether that is a healthy way to run a company.

What They Already Believe

A business exists for the work it does. The people it employs. The clients it serves. The community around it. Done well, it makes all of them better off. Profit is what keeps it alive long enough to do that, and to grow the good it does.

Maximizing profit is not always the right strategy. But every business needs it eventually, however deep the pockets behind it. There is no shame in saying so.

Most employees would agree. What they get wrong is the size of it.

For thirty years, Alex Freytag, co-author of Profit Works, has asked employees a simple question: what percentage of every sales dollar do you think the business keeps as profit?

The answers cluster between 30 and 50 percent. At companies that keep the numbers quiet, the guess runs closer to 50.

The real number is rarely close. Margins swing by industry, from low single digits to 25 percent or more, and almost no employee knows where their own company sits. No one has shown them.

So they guess. And the guess is not neutral.

They watch the company win a contract, hire, expand, and do the math they have been left to do. They conclude the owners must be making a fortune. They wonder why the person doing the work sees so little of it.

That is not a failure of character. It is what anyone does with a blank where a number should be.

This is what the planning room gets backward. Withholding the number does not keep the peace. It leaves the team to draw its own conclusions. And the conclusion is rarely generous.

The number is not really a secret. The leadership team knows it. The bookkeeper and the accountant know it. The bank knows it, because you showed them to get the line of credit.

Everyone who needs it has it.

Everyone except the people being asked to hit it.

Two Companies That Share the Number

I have watched this play out more than once. Two companies come to mind. One had shared its numbers for years. The other found out what sharing was worth when the market turned.

The first shares its profitability with everyone, as a matter of course. Not once a year at a meeting.

In lean years, this changes how people behave. They see the margin slipping and treat it as their problem, not just the owner's. They question spending they would have waved through. They protect revenue they would have let slip. They protect the number, because they understand what it protects.

In strong years, they understand what the money is for. Stability. A reserve for the next downturn. Fuel to grow. And what is left is the owners' return for the years there was no profit at all.

The second is a logistics company. For most of its history the market was kind to it. Then the ground shifted. Container prices spiked, and the old way of pricing stopped working.

Because the whole team could see it, they responded. They found ways to adjust operations. They reworked pricing. They built new offerings to bridge the gap and protect the margin. The ideas came from everywhere, because the problem was no longer hidden from anyone.

They came through it because everyone could see the real state of the business, not just their piece of it.

When It Gets Out

Some leaders resist sharing profitability because they fear it will get out. To competitors, to suppliers, to clients.

But if you are running a great business, the number barely matters. Suppliers who get paid on time do not care what your margin was. Customers who are well served do not audit your books. A competitor who learns your margin has a number without the story. Not where it is headed, not what you are reinvesting, not what stands behind it. A margin is a snapshot. It is not the business.

Plenty of good companies run thin, even lose money, for years while they build, and it costs them nothing outside their walls. Outsiders do not judge you on the number. They judge you on how you operate.

Where to Start

The two companies did not get there by accident. They shared the numbers, and they taught people how to read them.

Decide What the Numbers Mean

Sharing profitability does not mean opening the general ledger. It does not mean posting salaries. It means the top line and the bottom line, and enough context to read them. What the company brought in, what it kept, and where the difference went.

Jack Stack built an entire discipline around this in The Great Game of Business. If you want to go further, start there. Most companies do not need to. They need people to understand how the business makes money and how their work moves it.

Teach People to Read Them

This is where leaders balk. “My people will not understand a financial statement.”

But you are not teaching accounting. You are teaching where the money goes. Say $100 comes in the door. $30 goes to the people who did the work. $10 goes to materials. The rest covers rent, insurance, equipment, the overhead that keeps the jobs coming. What is left is smaller than anyone guesses.

Anyone can follow that. It is the same math they do with their own paycheck. And once they can see it, they see how their work moves the number.

This is the correction the silence was preventing. Showing people a number is not the same as helping them understand it. Only one of those builds trust.

Explain Who Earns What Is Left

Someone will ask why the owners keep the remainder. It is the return on risk. The owners signed the lease, guaranteed the loan, and went years without a paycheck while everyone else got paid. Sometimes there is nothing left. That is the deal they took, and the person asking did not.

When someone pushes harder, I take a different approach. If they want to build something of their own, I offer to mentor them. Nothing means more to me than watching an entrepreneur succeed. Hearing it out loud does something an explanation cannot. No one has taken me up on it yet. It makes the risk real.

Consider Sharing the Upside

For many companies, understanding is enough. But some leaders go further and share the profit itself, through a bonus plan that pays out when the company performs. Done well, it aligns everyone around the same number instead of asking them to care out of goodwill. Profit Works lays out how to structure one that funds itself.

Pay Fairly First

None of this works if you are underpaying people. Pay at market or better. It is not something the team needs to see on a page. It is something they need to be true. Open books on a company that shorts its team while the owners take money out does not build trust. It documents the problem.

The Decision You Already Made

Go back to the planning room. The number is on the board, and someone has just said the team cannot see it.

By now the reason sounds thin. Hiding the number does not protect anyone. It leaves them to guess, and the guess is never kind. Share it, teach them to read it, and the guessing stops. People who understand the business rally behind it. People left in the dark invent the rest.

If you have held back, it is worth asking why. Not the reason you gave in the room, but the real one. And whether it still holds.

Give them the number, and the story they tell themselves can finally match the one you know.

Related Essays

Building a Long-Term Goal That Works: How to set a destination specific enough to change decisions and clear enough to hold the team accountable. This article picks up where that one leaves off: once the goal is set, deciding who gets to see the number that measures it.

Getting Your Vision Shared by All: Why clarity has to be shared across the organization to scale. Sharing the numbers is one of the most direct forms of that clarity.

Running a Business by the Numbers: The weekly discipline of tracking what's actually happening while there's still time to act. Financial transparency is what lets that discipline reach beyond the leadership team.

Footnotes & Sources

Louis D. Brandeis quote: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." From Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It (1914).

Employee profit perception: Based on three decades of research by Alex Freytag, who has asked employees across hundreds of companies to estimate what share of revenue the business keeps as profit. Guesses typically fall between 30 and 50 percent, running toward the higher end where financials are not shared, against real margins that are usually a fraction of that.

Profit literacy and incentive plans:Profit Works (2020), by Alex Freytag and Tom Bouwer, on building profit-sharing plans that fund themselves. Freytag's Stretch Not Snap (2024) is a business parable about a leadership team struggling to align around profit, and how a well-designed plan rallies everyone behind it.

Open-book management: Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham, The Great Game of Business (1992). The definitive treatment of the fuller discipline this article points toward, and an early source for the point that employees overestimate profit.