Mosongo Moukwa shows SMB owners how to stop spreading thin and start compounding profit through strategic focus and smarter decisions.
GROWTH PILLAR: Sales & Revenue
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Manufacturers / Leaders building systems
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A practical 7-lever profit framework, a decision-making reset, and a clear method for finding money already inside their business
Most business owners think growth means doing more. Mosongo Moukwa thinks that assumption is costing you profit.
In this East Trade Winds session, Mosongo — author, coach, and manufacturing expert — walks through the three pillars of sustainable business growth: clarity of purpose, strategic focus, and sustainable leadership. The session zeroes in on focus. Not as a mindset habit, but as a decision with real financial consequences.
Mosongo introduces seven business levers — leads, conversion, closing, retention, transaction value, frequency, and cost — and shows attendees how a 10% improvement across each compounds into a 54% profit jump. Push to 40% and profitability climbs 250%. The math is simple. The discipline is not.
He grounds the framework in two real examples: a precision machine shop running at four million in revenue but losing ground on profit, and a cosmetic manufacturer who waited six months to raise prices and paid for it every day. Both businesses turned the corner not by working harder, but by deciding what to stop.
The session closes with a live exercise — attendees map their own numbers against the seven levers and identify the one decision that has been sitting too long.
Key topics covered:
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Next Steps
Mosongo Moukwa (00:06)
thank you, for inviting me here. And before I begin, I'd like to ask you a question, but don't answer it right now, just just think about it. So if you could eliminate one product, one service, or one customer tomorrow.
Which one would actually make your business stronger? Because most business owners instinctively think growth comes from adding more. Today I'd like to challenge that assumption.
So this is just some intro I wanted to tell you that actually from my journey working in corporate with Fortune five hundred companies and my own entrepreneurship journey that led me to come up with this framework which I I use now to help leaders to find sustainable growth without chaos. One is clarity of purpose.
which is knowing where you are going and why it matters, then a strategic focus, doing less, but doing what matters. And then finally sustainable leadership, because you have to sustain that performance. So building the building success, you know, that you can maintain and enjoy it, which involve many things. It involves your capability, involve a relationship, and so on. And if you have all those three, and if the if you align them,
then now you are in a position where you can fire all cylinders. But for for the purpose of my talk today I'm just going to focus primarily on the on the in the area of a strategic focus.
So focus is a decision. And most people avoid that decision. Here's the difference. Before, as you were struggling to find your clarity, it felt like everything was pulling at you. Now it's about what you choose to keep and what you choose to keep engaging with. So that's really what it is here.
So let's think about how most business owners they actually focus their time. They don't like effort, they don't like ideas, but they refuse to narrow. So that's really how we are currently operating. So the problem is not what's coming at you, it's what you are not willing to exclude. So what happens? Efforts get diluted, priorities compete, decisions slow down, results feel inconsistent.
And this is where it breaks. So focus is not just about effort, it's about concentration. You are moving, but you are not moving forward. So imagine that you are in a dark room. You have a flashlight. You could try to light up the entire room. So you keep moving the lights everywhere. A little here, a little there, trying to see everything.
But nothing is really clear. So now imagine something different. You stop moving the light and you focus it in one place. Suddenly everything becomes visible. That's how focus works in your business. Focus doesn't mean doing more, it means seeing clearly. And in your business, there are only a few places where that light actually matters.
A small number of priorities drive the majority of your results in your business. In fact, about twenty percent of what you focus on drives eighty percent of your outcome. What does that mean? What it means is that most of your effort is now creating your growth. Is not creating your growth, sorry. You don't need to do more, you need to focus better.
Let me ask you something. If you are spending twenty percent of your time working on your business, is that time consistently focused on the right things?
Because what I've seen is that when you focus on the right seven levels that are put here, you can create a predictable pathway to profit. In many cases, the twenty per cent drive the eighty percent of the revenue. So these seven levers are not theoretical leads, conversion, closing, retention, the dollar amount you are charging, frequency of sales and costs.
They have been used repeatedly by businesses that reinvent and growth. And this challenges the assumption that success requires more doing. Instead, I'm inviting you to focus on the small set of high-leverage activities. So please take a piece of paper and walk with me through here by using your own numbers. Your lead, how many lists you currently have. Write it down. What's your conversion rate?
How much you're charging for each transaction. And then there you can compute your revenue. And then you add on those repeated orders, then that gives you some kind of revenue. Then you take out fixed cost and variable costs, and then you're going to have profit. So compute that with your numbers, along with me here. I'll give you one second for you to do that quickly. You don't need to have the exact number, but just have some idea.
For example, if you are not too sure about what your fixed cost is, just make some assumption and whatnot. So in this particular example, leads is 100 and so on. So for this one here, revenue is 120 and profit is 96,000. Now, if incrementally we we improve each one of those by 10%, so your leads from 100 becomes 110, the 40 customer become 48.4.
Your transaction value, you're charging more, so it gives you 550 here. I repeated order, you increase a little bit by 10%. And now your revenue, right before it was 120, now it's 173. And then your feast costs remain the same, but your variable cost because you're doing more transaction, so that increases a little bit. So therefore your profitability will be so much. So as you're competing along with me with your own numbers, just look at whether in fact you're seeing
Those improvement. For this particular case, revenue has improved by 44%. But profitability has improved much, much faster, 54%. So I like telling my clients, revenue is for your ego. But profitability, that's what feeds you. So now we did 10%. Let's try to do 40% incremental. So again, compete along with me with your own numbers.
And then you can see what's happening. So compute their leads. What is the lead now? Conversion, transaction, and so on. In this particular case, revenue now 333.314. And profitability is 339. So before your profitability increased by 54 percent, but look now we have an increase of profitability of 250 percent. So those small incremental there that we have there.
If you if if you do them, then you can see that it has really an outsize impact on your profitability. That is revenue compounded.
Now let's make it real for you for a moment here. So think about everything you're currently working on. Now remove the option to do it all of it. If you could only focus on one thing, what would move your business the most?
So let's write it down. Take a couple of minutes, your pencil, your main products and services, write it down. Your key customers, what types of customers you currently have, your major activities. Take a second there for you to to do that. And then once you have done that, now circle what clearly fits.
But also circle what fields that you have added over time.
And then what I would like for you to do is that to ask yourself, What would I not include if I started today?
Now let me illustrate this with a with a typical example based on the kind of manufacturer that I've worked with in the past. So this is a precision machine shop. They were manufacturing custom metal components for industrial customers. On paper, they looked healthy. In fact, their annual revenue was just above four million. Machines were running, backlog was full. But the owner told me, he said.
We are busier than we have ever been, but yet it feels like we are making less money. So when we analyzed the business, we discovered the problem was not demand, it was focus. Over the years, they had developed a habit of saying yes to almost every opportunity. Small one off jobs, rush orders, highly customized parts, tiny production runs.
Every new order required different toolings, different machine setup and different scheduling. Revenue was growing, but productivity was falling. So I ask one simple question which customers and product generate the most profit? The analysis revealed something surprising. Nearly seventy five percent of their gross profit came from only thirty percent of their customers.
And those customers placed the repeated order for a relatively small number of parts. So together we made a strategic decision. They stopped accepting many of the low-margin, high customers' jobs. They concentrated production on their most profitable product families. They focused their sales effort on customers with repeated demand rather than on one-time order. So the result as were for the next six months.
was significant. 30% reduction in setting time, 20% reduction in overtime, higher machine utilization. And this led them to 18 improvement in gross profit, which represented more than 400,000 in annual profit on a four million dollar manufacturer. And this is without purchasing a single new machine or adding a single salesperson.
They did not become more profitable because they worked harder. They became more profitable because they became more focused. That is what that 20% does.
Now the your business does not need more from you. It needs focus. Because a small number of those priorities drive the majority of your results. And if you don't choose what matters, everything else will. Now, let's be honest here. And you have probably heard things like this before. You know you should simplify. You know where your focus should be. So why hasn't anything changed?
Well, what most business owners they do, they delay the decision that matters. They wait for certainty. They keep options open. They revisit the same questions again and again until it feels responsible. But but it's actually what keeps them stuck.
Every decision that you delay has a cost.
Here's the deeper truth. Your business grows at the speed of your decision. Not your effort, not your ideas, but your decisions. So what's happening is that most of your decisions that matter involve trade offs, involve risk, involve letting something go.
So let's think of it this way. Take again up your piece of paper, think of one decision, the one that has been sitting there.
You already know which one it is. We always do. So how long has it been sitting?
And what is it already costing you to not make it? Costing you in time, in energy, in missed opportunities.
You don't need more information. All you need is to make a decision. That's what it is. Because until that decision is made, everything else stays heavier than it needs to. Let me give you this example. So, most business owners they don't talk about this, but I see this all the time. I was speaking with a business owner recently. They were running a small cosmetic manufacturing business. They had one decision sitting. They knew it.
It was pricing change because raw material, raw ingredient costs had gone up, packaging had increased, margin was tightening, but they kept waiting. Because they were worried about how retailers would react and whether they would lose that shelf's space. So I asked them, How long has this been sitting? They said, probably six months. And then I asked, What is it already costing you?
To not decide. They paused. And you could see it. They already knew. So they made a decision. Not perfectly, but no not not with full certainty. But within two weeks, they adjusted pricing across the product line, the quantified outcome, the and revenue increase by about six percent. Their key retail partners stayed, and the pressure they had been feeling started to ease.
And things did not get more complicated, they got clearer. Because once a decision is made, momentum returns.
So most business owners don't struggle because they are bad strategy, but it's because decisions sit too long until the options narrow. Remember, your business grows at the speed of your decision. And I will end my my my talk here, but let's get started. what I would like to do, I would wanted to invite you to have a complimentary copy of
Find money that is already yours there. So if you go to this QR code, you can download a copy of that. It's a guide, it's a short guide, a practical firm framework for uncovering hidden profit in your business. And if you would like to continue the the conversation, please connect with me. I'm on LinkedIn and I am in Facebook. toki thank you so much for your attention and participating with my exercising.
thank you so much.