LivePlan

A common rule of thumb is that a 5% net profit margin is low, 10% is healthy, and 20% or more is strong. But what counts as a good profit margin for your business depends almost entirely on what you sell.

Profit margin can mean three things. Gross margin is revenue minus the cost of making what you sell. Operating margin takes that gross margin and subtracts what it costs to run the business, like rent, payroll, and software, and net margin is what's left after every expense, including interest and taxes.

Grocery stores average about a 2% net margin, construction companies about 6%, and software companies closer to 25%. Research the average profit margin for your industry before you set goals for your business.

Use LivePlan to benchmark your numbers against other businesses in your industry. Get started using the link in our bio.

The average small business sold for 2.7x its annual cash flow in Q2 2026, so a business clearing $130K a year in profit won't come cheap.

Before you agree on a price, make sure the numbers and the team behind them hold up. Audit the P&L and ask whether that profit already accounts for an owner's salary. Then find out who runs the business day to day, and whether they're staying after the sale.

Request five years of financials instead of last year alone or an 18-year average. Recent history shows where the business stands today and which direction it's heading.

Thinking about buying a business? Use our Help Me Forecast feature to project how the business will perform under your ownership. Get started using the link in our bio.

Our Pitch Deck feature turns your business plan into an investor-ready presentation, so you can spend less time formatting and more time preparing to pitch.

Get started using the link in our bio.

Airbnb now has more than 8 million listings worldwide. With that many listings, you need to give guests a real reason to pick your property over every other one in their search results.

A generic description and a set of basic photos will make it tough to keep your property consistently booked. Pick a theme tied to an actual reason people travel to the area your Airbnb is located in.

Have your pricing be dictated by seasonality and demand instead of setting one flat rate for the whole year. A short-term rental that can accommodate groups of four or more is often where real profit shows up.

Get access to our free Airbnb business plan using the link in our bio.

A business plan can take 40 to 80 hours to write, and that's for someone who already knows what they're doing.

As a founder, it's easy to price hiring a plan writer against zero, as if writing it yourself is free. It isn't. Those hours come out of selling, hiring, and operating.

Run the math on what your own hours are worth to the business right now. The answer can make a plan writer look reasonable, and it can just as easily confirm that writing it yourself is the right call.

This is part four in our series explaining when hiring a business plan writer makes sense, and when it doesn't.

Whether you want to write your plan yourself or hire a plan writer, create your lender-ready business plan in LivePlan. Get started using the link in our bio.

Your business budget should reflect the business you’re running right now, not the version you planned for back in January.

Updating it takes three steps. Pull your last three months of actual numbers and compare them to what you planned, then rewrite the line items that changed. Finally, look ahead at the next hire you're planning, your slow season, and any changes to your costs.

Connecting QuickBooks or Xero to your LivePlan account pulls your actual numbers straight into your forecast. Change one number and you can watch everything update in real time, including what it does to your cash.

Use LivePlan to create and manage your business budget. Get started using the link in our bio.

Your house shouldn't be the first thing you put on the line to fund a new business.

Start with your local Small Business Development Center (SBDC) instead. SBDC advisors know the bank loan landscape in your community, including whether you're a fit for an SBA-backed loan and what your options are if you aren't.

Because SBDCs are funded by tax dollars, most of their services are free.

Use LivePlan to build the business plan and financial forecast you'll bring to your local SBDC advisor. Get started using the link in our bio.

Financial forecasting can feel overwhelming when you’re staring at a blank spreadsheet. Our new Help Me Forecast feature guides you through questions about your business and helps you build a strong forecast, so you don’t have to figure out every number on your own.

Get started using the link in our bio.

US restaurant sales are projected to hit $1.55 trillion this year, but 42% of restaurant owners said their restaurant wasn't profitable last year.

Many new restaurants get the food right and the numbers wrong. Before you sign a lease, you need to build out a full financial forecast. Make sure you know your food and beverage cost as a percentage of projected revenue, your labor costs, and how many guests you need to serve each day to break even.

Our free restaurant business plan, Bistro Locale, walks through a 45-seat restaurant with $580,000 in startup funding, food and beverage cost held to 30% of revenue, and a five-year forecast that shows when the business starts making money.

Get access to this free restaurant business plan using the link in our bio.