There's a specific kind of 11pm loneliness that comes with running a business. You've hit a wall, the P&L is telling you something you can't quite read, and you do what everyone does now: you open your phone. You listen to a podcast about scaling, you read a thread from somebody who exited for nine figures, you buy the course or at least think about it. You consume, and consume, and at the end of it you know a little more about somebody else's business and nothing new about your own.
Here's the question none of it ever answers: are you doing this right? Not the kind of question a podcast answers. Is your gross margin normal for a company your size in your line of work, is your rent eating too much, is your owner comp reasonable or are you quietly starving the business to pay yourself? The advice can't tell you. It doesn't know your numbers, and it was never built to.
This is the pattern I've watched play out with founders for years. They over-invest in advice, which is abundant and free and fits nobody in particular, and they under-invest in the one input that would actually tell them where they stand: a small group of people running businesses at their scale, who will put their real financials on the table next to theirs.
The thing car dealers have known since 1947
Go into the auto, powersports, or RV dealer world and you'll find something most software and services founders have never heard of: the 20 Group. NCM Associates started them in 1947, and the model has barely changed because it works. You take about twenty non-competing dealers of similar size, from different parts of the country so nobody's protecting turf, and you put them in a room a few times a year. Everybody brings their actual financials. Not their story. Their numbers, formatted the same way so they line up, rolled into what they call a composite. You get to see exactly where you sit against people who do what you do.
Roughly one in five auto dealers loses money every year, and a lot of owners simply don't know what good looks like until they see it sitting in a column next to their own.
Read that again if you run a business that isn't a dealership. One in five dealers lose money every year, mostly for lack of a reference point. From my experience, that same blind spot sits inside almost every small business. The dealer world happened to build a tool for it a long time ago, but most other industries never went looking for their own.
Why you haven't done this
Let's be honest about the resistance, because it's real. Showing another founder your actual financials feels like undressing in a cold room. Maybe your margins are embarrassing, or maybe you're the one quietly losing money and the data proves it in front of people you respect. But that fear is exactly why the thing works. Advice is comfortable because it stays abstract and lets you nod along without ever showing anything. A benchmark is specific, which is what makes it uncomfortable, and specific is what actually changes how you run your business.
The second objection I hear from most struggling businesses is that your business is different. Maybe. But the parts that decide whether you make money, cost of delivery, overhead ratios, revenue per employee, how much you can pull out, are more comparable across businesses than you'd like to believe. A software company and a landscaping company look nothing alike until you get down to the P&L, and then they start to rhyme.
The third objection is the practical one: there's no 20 Group for my industry. For most founders outside the dealer trades, that's true. So go build your own.
How to build the version that works
Three things separate a benchmarking group from a networking group, and if you miss any of them you've just made a lunch club.
First, the members have to be non-competing and at a similar scale. Look for four to eight people who run businesses roughly your size but can't take your customers. Same stage, different lane. The moment two competitors are in the room, everyone starts performing and the numbers get careful.
Second, real financials go on the table, formatted the same way. Not "revenue's up." The actual P&L, the same line items, so a gross margin sits next to a gross margin. If nobody in the room is a little uncomfortable, you're doing it wrong.
Third, there's standing accountability. The real value shows up at the next meeting, when somebody asks whether you actually cut the software spend you flagged last time. Spotting the waste is the easy part; but change comes because John is going to ask you about it in the next meeting. Most founders already know two or three things they should fix, and a group that meets regularly turns "I should" into "I did," because you have to sit in front of the same people who watched you say it.
If a full group feels like too much to organize, start smaller. Find one founder at your scale in a different industry, agree to trade real numbers over coffee once a quarter, and tell each other the truth. That's a two-person composite, and I promise you that it will teach you more than the next fifty hours of podcasts ever could.
There's a whole industry built on selling founders the feeling of getting better. The polished CEO-spotlight series, the paid mastermind that's really a marketing asset, the guru mostly selling access to the guru. It all sounds amazing in a highlight reel, but none of it will tell you whether you're overpaying for rent. The people who can tell you that are the ones doing roughly what you do, looking at your real books and asking why you keep running the play that clearly doesn't work anymore. Not many people sell that, and nobody is going to assemble it for you, so the work of finding four or five people who'll open their books is yours to do.
Keep building,
-- JW
