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The operating standard for service businesses

The 60-15-15 Standard.

The financial operating framework that governs every scalable service business. Four numbers. One system. Total clarity.

Book Your Scale-Ready Assessment Calculate Your Profit Gap
Anatomy of $1.00 in revenueTarget allocation
60%Gross Margin
15%S&M
15%G&A
30%Net Profit
Gross Margin Sales & Marketing G&A Overhead Net Profit
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0160% gross margin
0215% sales & marketing
0315% G&A
0430% net profit

Installed across $96M+ in service revenue

$402,838
Tax liability eliminated through entity restructuring and strategic planning.
$220K+
Annual tax savings deployed for a legal services firm.
$185K+
Tax savings captured through proactive quarterly strategy.
$125K
In past overpayments recaptured through amended returns and structure corrections.
$96.2M
Revenue under management.
Case study How we applied the 60-15-15 to a marketing agency → Case study From a $402K liability to an $80K refund in one year →

The Four Numbers

Four numbers that tell you everything about your business.

Each isolates a different failure mode. When they're aligned, profit compounds. When they drift, it bleeds.

60% Gross Margin
01 · Gross Margin

What you keep after delivering the work.

Revenue minus direct costs — labor, subcontractors, tools, materials. This is the rawest test of whether your business model actually works. Everything else is downstream of this number.

Below 60%
Underpricing, over-delivering, or carrying too much direct cost.
At or above 60%
Pricing power, efficient delivery, room to scale profitably.
02 · Sales & Marketing

What it costs to win new business.

Advertising, sales comp, marketing tools, content, biz dev. This is where growth ambition meets math — and where most service businesses quietly leak profit chasing the wrong channels.

Over 15%
CAC eating profit. Broken funnel, wrong ICP, or weak conversion.
10–15%
Repeatable acquisition. Predictable unit economics.
15% Sales & Marketing
15% G&A Overhead
03 · G&A Overhead

The silent margin killer.

Rent, insurance, admin, software, accounting, legal — everything not tied to delivery or sales. G&A creeps up one SaaS subscription, one office upgrade, one non-revenue hire at a time. Nobody notices until margin is gone.

Over 15%
Overhead has outgrown the business. Tool bloat, admin drag.
Under 15%
Lean back-office. Every dollar defensible and reviewed.
04 · Net Profitability

The outcome when the system is working.

What's left for reinvestment, distributions, debt paydown, and enterprise value. Most service businesses run at 5–10%. The gap to 30% is usually hundreds of thousands in recoverable profit, every single year.

5–10%
Typical. Fragile. One bad quarter from a cash crunch.
30%
Reinvestment capacity. Valuation premium. Real optionality.
30% Net Profit

The Calculator

Find your profit gap in 30 seconds.

Drop in your revenue and rough margins. We'll map it to the 60-15-15 and show you exactly how much profit the standard would recover per year.

Your business

Annual revenue$3,000,000
Gross margin42%
Sales & marketing22%
G&A overhead18%
Your stack today2%
The 60-15-15 standard30%
60%
15%
15%
30%
Your annual profit gap
$840,000
That's how much more profit you'd clear every year on the 60-15-15 standard.

PDF includes your numbers, the gap, and the install plan. No spam.

Same Revenue · Different Outcome

What $3M looks like with and without the standard.

BeforeTypical $3M Business
Gross Margin
Sales & Marketing
G&A
Net Profit$60K
After 60-15-15Optimized $3M Business
Gross Margin
Sales & Marketing
G&A
Net Profit$900K
The gap
+$840,000
recoverable net profit, every single year — on the same top-line revenue. That's the cost of not running the standard.
Recover your gap

The Install

90 days from chaos to operating standard.

The 60-15-15 isn't a report — it's an operating system we install, monitor, and optimize every month.

Day 0Day 90+
Day 0
01
Days 1–14 · Diagnose

Map every dollar.

We audit your financials and run them through the 60-15-15. You get a scorecard showing where every dollar goes — and exactly where it's leaking.

  • Full P&L restructured through the 60-15-15 standard
  • 3-year tax liability audit & overpayment recovery review
  • Scale-Ready scorecard delivered with bottleneck ranking
  • 30-day quick-win action list prioritized by $ impact
By Day 14 You know your four numbers — and what's broken.
02
Days 15–60 · Install

Rebuild the system.

We restructure the chart of accounts, clean the data, deploy tax strategy, and wire up a live dashboard that runs the standard automatically every month.

  • Chart of accounts rebuilt around the 60-15-15
  • Books cleaned, reconciled, and monthly-close standardized
  • Tax strategy deployed — entity, comp, retirement, timing
  • Live KPI dashboard wired to your accounting system
By Day 60 Your financial OS runs without you.
03
Days 61–90+ · Execute

Compound the gain.

Monthly CFO meetings with budget vs. actuals. We isolate the single biggest bottleneck, execute the fix, and move to the next — margin compounding every cycle.

  • Monthly CFO meeting: budget vs. actuals vs. the standard
  • One bottleneck isolated and fixed per cycle (pricing / CAC / GM / G&A)
  • Rolling 13-week cash-flow + 12-month forecast
  • Quarterly exit-readiness review against enterprise-value levers
Day 90+ Margin compounding. Net profit climbing toward 30%.

What's Included

Five disciplines, one operating standard.

The 60-15-15 isn't just a framework — it's the diagnostic core of a full financial engagement. Here's what we run for you on the standard.

01

Bookkeeping

Books cleaned, reconciled monthly, and structured around the 60-15-15 chart of accounts so every report is decision-ready.

Explore
02

Tax Returns

Federal, state, and entity returns prepared and filed in-house — every position aligned to the year-long strategy, not patched at deadline.

Explore
03

Tax Planning

Proactive quarterly strategy: entity structure, owner comp, retirement design, and timing — engineered to compound savings every year.

Explore
04

CFO Strategy

Monthly CFO meeting, live KPI dashboard, rolling cash-flow and forecast — one bottleneck isolated and fixed per cycle.

Explore
05

Exit Planning

Quarterly enterprise-value review against the levers that move multiples — so the business is sale-ready long before you decide to sell.

Explore

Industries We Serve

The standard runs across every service vertical.

The math is the same. The bottlenecks are different. We've installed the 60-15-15 across twelve verticals — here's where it lives.

Marketing Agencies

Retainer mix. Project margin discipline.

View
Law Firms

Trust accounts. Partner comp.

View
Healthcare

Practice ownership. Payer mix.

View
SaaS

ARR. Net revenue retention.

View
Recruitment Firms

Placement margin. Comp leverage.

View
E-commerce

Ad spend ROAS. Inventory drag.

View
Coaching & Consulting

Productized fees. Capacity utilization.

View
Cyber Security

MRR. Compliance overhead.

View
Real Estate

Carry costs. Disposition timing.

View
Investment Companies

Carry. Pass-through entity stack.

View
Plastic Surgeons

Procedure mix. Owner draw timing.

View
Senior Living

Census. Labor leverage.

View
Hover to pause · drag to explore all twelve

Run your business through the standard.

The Scale-Ready Assessment maps your financials to the 60-15-15 and shows you exactly how much profit you're leaving on the table. Free for US-based service businesses doing $1M–$20M.

Book Your Scale-Ready Assessment

No obligation. No pitch. Just the numbers.

Bennett Financials runs a flat $5K/month engagement. If you're under $1M revenue or that's not your budget range, the Scale-Ready Assessment will still give you the diagnostic — but the full engagement isn't a fit.

FAQ

Questions about 60-15-15 Profit Framework.

Clear answers to the questions owners ask before deciding what to do next.

The 60-15-15 standard is a financial operating framework for service businesses: 60% gross margin, 15% sales & marketing, 15% G&A overhead, leaving 30% net profit. It's the structure every scalable service business converges to.

They're derived from running financial strategy across hundreds of service businesses over eight years. At these ratios, businesses scale predictably, reduce owner dependence, and command premium valuations. Drift from any one number and you can isolate the failure mode — pricing, CAC, or overhead.

You're either underpricing, over-delivering, or carrying too much direct cost. The fix usually starts with pricing architecture and scoping discipline before any cost-cutting.

Full deployment takes 90 days. Most clients see measurable movement on at least two of the four numbers in the first 30 days — usually G&A and tax strategy. Gross margin and S&M take longer because they require pricing and funnel changes.

Yes, for US-based service businesses doing $1M–$20M in revenue — marketing agencies, law firms, healthcare, SaaS, recruitment, e-commerce ops, consulting. The framework is industry-agnostic because the underlying math of service businesses is the same.

Yes. Most service businesses run at 5–10% because they've never structured the P&L properly, not because 30% is unreachable. Bennett Financials clients routinely hit 25–35% net within 12 months of full deployment.

Cutting costs shrinks the business. The 60-15-15 restructures how revenue flows through it — pricing, delivery efficiency, funnel economics, overhead discipline, and tax strategy. The result is more profit on the same or growing revenue.

Start with a consistently classified profit and loss statement, then calculate gross margin, sales and marketing spend, general and administrative overhead, and net profit against revenue. Definitions and one-time items should be handled consistently so the comparison is meaningful.