The Numbers You Trust Live in a Spreadsheet No Buyer Accepts
A founder can see profit by service line and by project. It lives in a set of Google Sheets. The accounting system, the one an outsider would actually open, cannot produce it.
September 11, 2026
·
1 min read
In a financial reporting session, Adam Blake, founder ofMagna Technology Group, a Salesforce implementation firm, was working throughhow to see profitability by service line and by project. The firm already hadthe analysis. Someone on the team had pulled the data out and built it by hand,and it worked. Then he jumped ten years forward.
Notice the direction of the scenario. He was not imaginingbeing sold. He was imagining being the buyer, and someone on the other side, alender or a seller's advisers, asking to see the books before the deal. It runsthe same either way. The request arrives, and the answer is either inside thesystem of record or it is not.
The room's response was not a tool recommendation. The coachon the call, who has been inside dozens of member firms' books, said thatalmost none of them can get service line and project profitability out of theiraccounting system. Most firms are in exactly this position and have no idea,because the spreadsheet keeps working.
The rest of the session went to the unglamorous part: whatactually belongs in cost of goods sold, whether an internal product teamcounts, where a software licence goes. Which is the real work. Segmentation youcannot defend line by line is not evidence.
Why it matters to you.
A buyer does not audit your insight. They audit your books. When the number that supports your story exists only in a spreadsheet you maintain yourself, one of two things happens in diligence: it gets rebuilt from scratch by someone who does not know your business, or it gets discounted. Both cost you money, and the second one costs you a multiple. The gap is usually structural rather than analytical. Most boutique firms work out their real economics years before their chart of accounts catches up, so the insight ends up living in a parallel system. That is fine while the only audience is you. It stops being fine the first time somebody with capital asks a question and expects the answer to come out of the same place your tax return does. Doing this early has a second payoff that has nothing to do with selling. Once the segmentation lives in the books, it arrives every month without anyone rebuilding it, which means you can manage against it instead of reconstructing it. The exit-readiness version of this project and the run-the-firm-better version are the same project.
“I'm thinking 10 years from now, when someone is coming to evaluate our firm, because we want to make an acquisition of someone else. And they say, great, let me look at your books, and we say great, we have all these Google Sheets of P&L by service line and by project, and they say well, it has to be within QuickBooks. - Adam Blake, founder, Magna Technology Group”
Your one thing.
Open your accounting system, not your spreadsheet, and try to pull gross margin for your two largest service lines for last quarter. If you cannot, you have just found the project, and it is far cheaper to do now than under a deadline someone else sets.
Collective 54 is where boutique service firm founders go to make more money, scale with less friction, and build a firm worth buying.
See if it’s a fit →