You Don't Have a Revenue Problem. You Have a Keep Problem.

Buckle up, buttercup. I want to tell you about a man who got rich breaking things on purpose.

You ever hear of Jack Roush?

The man is a legend in racing. He's built engines for decades that dominated every track from Daytona to Le Mans. So somebody finally asked him the obvious question: how do you keep turning out motors that leave everybody else staring at your taillights?

His answer was five words.

"I ain't afraid to break shit."

Here's what he meant. When Roush and his boys build a new engine, they don't baby it. They bolt it to the block, fire it up, put a brick on the throttle, and go eat lunch.

Eventually that motor screams its last and grenades itself all over the shop.

And that's the point. They tear it apart, find the one part that let go, beef it up, and do the whole thing again. Brick. Lunch. Boom.

They keep going until nothing breaks. Then they drop it in a car and go collect trophies.

Roush had a theory about why nobody else did this. He said the other teams were too chicken to break something that was already working.

That's the whole thing right there.

Your business is already working. That's exactly the problem.

It works well enough that you'd never take a brick to it. So you keep it running, you keep feeding it, and every year it gets a little bigger and takes a little more of you — and you never find out where it would have broken, or what it could have been if you'd found out on purpose, in a controlled room, with people who've done it before.

That's what these three days are. A controlled detonation of your company, with five other founders and me standing around the block.

1 — Margin: keep more of what you already sell

Most founders between $1M and $10M cannot tell me their net margin by product line inside of five minutes. They know revenue cold, gross profit roughly, and net "about."

That gap is where the money is hiding.

We go line by line through what you sell, what it actually costs to deliver, and which customers are quietly costing you money to keep. Almost every company I open up has at least one product or one customer segment subsidised by the rest of the business — and the founder is usually proud of it.

A single margin point on $3M is $30,000 a year. Every year. No new customers, no new ad spend, no new hires. Most rooms find several.

2 — Tax: stop tipping the IRS

This is the one nobody talks about, and I think it's malpractice.

You'll go to a conference that costs five figures to learn how to add revenue that gets taxed at your marginal rate — and not one session on the money already walking out the door every April.

I'm not a CPA and I won't pretend to be. What I will do is show you the strategies I've used across eleven companies and four exits, so you walk into your accountant's office knowing what to ask for.

And here's the part that should worry you: the rules changed underneath you. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed on July 4th, 2025 and rewrote a large part of the small-business playbook. If your CPA hasn't walked you through what moved, you're planning against a code that no longer exists.

A few of the things that are different now:

• The 20% pass-through deduction (Section 199A) was scheduled to die at the end of 2025. It didn't — it's permanent now.
• Qualified Small Business Stock changed materially. The holding period moved from a flat five years to a tiered 3/4/5-year schedule, the per-issuer cap went from $10M to $15M, and the company asset ceiling went from $50M to $75M — for stock acquired after July 4, 2025. That is an exit provision, and it is C-corp only, which is exactly why it belongs in the same room as your exit planning and not in a separate conversation three years too late.
• 100% bonus depreciation is permanent again for property acquired after January 19, 2025.
• Domestic R&D is fully expensible again under the new Section 174A — and smaller businesses can elect to apply it retroactively to 2022.
• 2026 retirement limits are $24,500 in employee deferral and $72,000 in total additions — more with catch-up, and considerably more if a cash balance plan fits your facts.

We'll also go through the mechanics owners get wrong: reasonable compensation for S-corp owners (the IRS has won these cases — Watson went to the Eighth Circuit and the Supreme Court declined to hear it), accountable plans, the 14-day rule under Section 280A(g) and precisely how people lose it, whether hiring your kids does anything for you (it depends entirely on your entity), and cost segregation if you own the building.

And we'll go through the IRS's own Dirty Dozen — so that when somebody at a conference offers you a micro-captive or a conservation easement, you know to walk away.

Every one of these goes to your CPA before you act on it. I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm going to tell you what exists in the code, what questions to ask, and how to tell whether your accountant is asleep at the wheel.

Educational only. Perry is not a CPA, attorney, or licensed adviser. Provisions cited are statutory and current as of August 2026; they apply differently to every business. Nothing here is tax advice — take it to your own professional.

3 — Freedom: get off the critical path

Here's the test. Not a metaphor. An actual test.

Could you leave for thirty days, starting tomorrow, with no laptop — and come back to a business that grew?

If the honest answer is no, you don't own a business. You own a job with employees. And it's the most expensive job in the world, because you can't quit it and you can't sell it.

This is also — and founders never connect these two things — the single biggest discount on your company's value. A buyer looking at a business that requires its founder isn't buying a company. He's buying your calendar. He will price it that way, or walk away.

So we map every decision that routes through you and sort them into three piles: kill it, delegate it with a written standard, or automate it. Then we build the grid — what you keep as CEO, what leaves your desk this month, and what has to exist for it to leave safely.

Less stress isn't a feeling. It's what happens when the number of things that can't happen without you goes down.

4 — Exit: build the thing somebody wants to buy

You will leave this business one day. Every founder does — by sale, by succession, or feet first.

The difference between the owner who plans that five years out and the one who takes the first offer he gets when he's tired is usually a multiple of everything he built.

Two companies with identical profit sell for wildly different numbers. What separates them is boring, knowable, and fixable.

Start with the number nobody tells you: only about 20–30% of businesses that go to market actually sell. And roughly one in three signed letters of intent never closes — with diligence findings, not financing, as the leading cause. The deal doesn't die because the buyer ran out of money. It dies because somebody opened the books.

Then there's timing. Most owners who plan an exit start less than a year before they list. That is not enough time to fix anything structural — a buyer is going to diligence three years of financials, and you cannot retroactively create a clean third year in month eleven.

The things buyers actually price:

• Customer concentration. Any single customer above 10% of revenue reads as a risk. Above 30–50%, the business may be effectively unsalable without heavy structural protection.
• Owner dependence. The discount here isn't standardized — it varies by appraiser — but it is always real, and it's the one you control most directly.
• Books that survive scrutiny. In owner-operated businesses, adjusted EBITDA routinely differs from reported EBITDA by 30–50% or more. Unverifiable add-backs are exactly where deals get repriced at the last minute.
• Which earnings number you're even quoting. SDE and EBITDA are not the same thing. The same company is honestly "3×" and "6×" at one identical price — and founders get talked out of real money because nobody explained that.

For scale: IBBA's Market Pulse puts median multiples in bands — roughly 2.0× under $500K and 3.3× around $1–2M of SDE, moving to 4.0× and above once you're into real EBITDA territory. Those are medians across thin samples, not a promise about your company. The point isn't the number. The point is that most owners have no idea which band they're in or what moves them within it.

I'm not going to promise you extra turns of multiple — anybody who does is selling. What I'll tell you is that the owners who get clean, boring, well-documented businesses in front of buyers are the ones whose deals actually close.

And here's why exit is the last lever and not a separate one: everything in levers one through three raises it. Better margin, less owner-dependence, cleaner numbers. You aren't doing two jobs. You're doing the same work and getting paid for it twice — once a year while you own it, and again when you sell it.

Why there are no testimonials on this page

You've noticed. Every page like this has a wall of five-star quotes from "Mike S." and "Rachel T."

I'm opening this format to the public for the first time. Until now, the only way into Breaking Point was for me to take equity in your company — it's how I vetted deals before buying into them.

So I don't have public testimonials for the public version yet, and I'm not going to invent them. You can check the record on the eleven companies and the exits. When there are real ones, they'll go right here, with real names attached.

The first cohorts get the version of this where I'm still trying to prove something. That's usually the best time to buy anything.