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> See, I don't get this. How do you have 50 employees and no profit? I don't understand that. Ask Uber? :-) But Silicon Valley jokes aside, you can have a smal

> See, I don't get this. How do you have 50 employees and no profit? I don't understand that. Ask Uber? :-) But Silicon Valley jokes aside, you can have a small business where the amount of money coming in pretty much exactly matches the money going out, and that is essentially no profit. For a real estate business, most of those employees would be brokers who would make no salary but would make a piece on the commission of each sale. So the percentage of the commissions that the agency kept covered rent, and admin staff, and maybe a salary for the principals.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
Well, you will have to excuse me, but I'm some ninny who gave up a National Merit Scholarship to a big university elsewhere and went to the local college for a couple of years, then dropped out, in part because I knew two people with tons of student loans and no serious career who were mooching off of family (the mother in one case, the wife in another). So I didn't drink the koolaid and buy the idea that a sheepskin was a slam dunk path to having a real career and life on easy street. Thus, I wasn't willing to run up student loans to get a degree. I felt I could deliver newspapers (because that's what these two guys were doing) without a student loan and my life would be better without the debt if that was what I would be doing anyway. I also found ways to make money on the internet while homeless and that helped get me off the street. It was critical that it actually turn a profit for me. Low pay was acceptable. High through-puts of money -- some going out and some coming in -- without a real profit absolutely was not acceptable. So while I'm well aware of Twitter and Uber and all that, I cannot fathom running a small business that doesn't turn a profit. I just don't get that. To my mind, that makes no sense. Why on earth would I do that? To my mind, you find something that is actually profitable and then grow it. It seems to me there has to be something wrong with a person's thinking that they take on 50 employees and still don't make money. I just cannot wrap my brain around such a choice. I look at what I read and I think the people running the business, who were praying to God for business to improve -- presumably instead of actively researching how to make things work better (I realize you can do both and that assumption could be in error, but I can only go by the info included in the article) -- must have been doing something wrong in some important way.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Well, you will have to excuse me, but I'm some ninny who gave up a National Merit Scholarship to a big university elsewhere and went to the local college for a couple of years, then dropped out, in part because I knew two people with tons of student loans and no serious career who were mooching off of family (the mother in one case, the wife in another). So I didn't drink the koolaid and buy the idea that a sheepskin was a slam dunk path to having a real career and life on easy street. Thus, I wasn't willing to run up student loans to get a degree. I felt I could deliver newspapers (because that's what these two guys were doing) without a student loan and my life would be better without the debt if that was what I would be doing anyway. I also found ways to make money on the internet while homeless and that helped get me off the street. It was critical that it actually turn a profit for me. Low pay was acceptable. High through-puts of money -- some going out and some coming in -- without a real profit absolutely was not acceptable. So while I'm well aware of Twitter and Uber and all that, I cannot fathom running a small business that doesn't turn a profit. I just don't get that. To my mind, that makes no sense. Why on earth would I do that? To my mind, you find something that is actually profitable and then grow it. It seems to me there has to be something wrong with a person's thinking that they take on 50 employees and still don't make money. I just cannot wrap my brain around such a choice. I look at what I read and I think the people running the business, who were praying to God for business to improve -- presumably instead of actively researching how to make things work better (I realize you can do both and that assumption could be in error, but I can only go by the info included in the article) -- must have been doing something wrong in some important way.