How Open Book Management saved my agency from crippling debt

In February 2022, I made a decision that could have killed my marketing agency:

I bought out my business partner.

We’d bootstrapped ApricotLaw together since 2013. And now, the company was in debt for the first time.

SBA loans felt like a sword hanging over our heads every month.

It was sink or swim, and we needed consistent profits fast.

So we started implementing Open Book Management.

I made the decision a few months before the buyout. And I knew I wanted a Great Game of Business operating system to run the company, for a few reasons.

We’d tried other operating systems like EOS and Scaling Up in the past.

But only management really cared about them, and they never caught on with our frontline team members.

I wound up finding the GGOB through a Scaling Up masterclass, read the book by Jack Stack, and instantly realized it filled in all the gaps that we had with these other operating systems.

The biggest one was:

Getting everyone involved and engaged in the process of growing the company.

In most companies, employees are kept in the dark about everything outside their job description, and don’t care about their contribution.

But I saw that Open Book Management would help us fix that, by:

1. Keeping employees in the loop about how money moves through the business

2. Putting employees in direct control of earning more pay, better benefits, and greater job security

If I just sat there and put the company in a ton of debt, and didn’t let employees in on the process, that would only lead to fear and confusion.

So I went all-in on Open Book Management and put my trust in my team.

Here’s how the numbers turned out:

In the first six months of 2022, all the way through June, we did over a million dollars in revenue.

But our net profit was only $30,000 — total garbage!

We’d been using forward forecasting for about three months by that point.

So we doubled down and dug into our P&L.

In July, we saw instant progress, making over 20% profit on revenue (about $38,000 that month).

And by the end of 2022, we increased our total net profit to $218,000!

It was nothing short of a miracle.

And it was 100% because we implemented the GGOB and OBM.

My team really stepped up to the plate, acted like owners, and turned the ship around.

We started consistently earning 22% to 25% net profit each month… and the rest is history.

The results were so impressive, it’s why I decided to become a Great Game of Business Coach in the first place.

If you’d like my help with implementing OBM and the GGOB into your agency:

Book a strategy call with me here.

Let’s build you a better team and a stronger business,

— Nick Kringas
Founder of Open Book CFO