Why the Magic Number of 1 is So Lonely

Have you Considered Gross Margins?

Depending on the stage of your startup, you might only be concerned with high growth and cash balances to sustain that growth. At some point, however, you must move beyond the Magic Number and consider gross margins. If it takes four quarters to pay off your sales and marketing expense, you have depleted all margin and have no margin remaining to cover service and overhead costs. You are not yet break even on this cohort of customers if you have only paid for sales and marketing expenses.

A Magic Number of 1 and 50% Gross Margin

If your gross margin is 50% and your Magic Number is 1, your first year is spent paying back a quarter’s worth of sales and marketing expense from the incremental revenue generated, and the second is year is required to reach breakeven. The higher your gross margin, the faster you reach the breakeven point. And vice versa for a lower gross margin.

You can see from the simple example below that our Magic Number is pegged at 1 and our gross margin is 50%. Based on our level of sales and marketing spend and our gross margin, we reach profitability in month 24. For simplicity, I assumed no churn but any churn would immediately decrease your Magic Number and lengthen the time it takes to reach profitability.

Conclusion                                                                                                                                                                                            

Startups and seasoned businesses must measure metrics that determine the health of their business, but the Magic Number or any other metric in isolation cannot determine the overall health of your business.  SaaS Metrics are most powerful when used together.  A Magic Number of 1 is a great start but make sure you are calculating payback periods, gross margin, and churn so that is not just a lonely number.

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Ed note: Want to dive deeper into essential FP&A topics? Check out OnPlan’s most popular posts of all time here:

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