The bottom-line. The total. The profits. Your cake. The more you make, the more you seem to spend. At the end of the year, you do the math and subtract your expenses from your business income. From that total, you subtract the taxes you’ll owe. What’s left after that? Never enough.

Successful adult webmasters are notorious when it comes to pimp-life excess. It’s one thing to hire competent staff, lease space and set up an office. It’s a whole other thing to go nuts with antique furnishings, on-site masseuses and sports car giveaways. Do you really need to stock the office fridge with Pelligrino when a filtered water cooler will serve the same purpose for hundreds of dollars less?

You have to spend money to make money. Nobody is telling you otherwise. The thing you have to ask yourself is: "Are you making money?"

"Make a list of all your expenses and perform some surgery on that list. The MINUSES are there. Cool factor is cool but is it cooler than money? Make your expenses list into one full of PLUSES."

The majority of new businesses lose money in the first year. One year is also the point when the new business owner asks the questions: “Do I go on? Is it worth it to keep my business open for another year? How much money have I lost so far and can I afford to continue lose money? Have I seen any return on my investments? Will I make a profit next year? Where did all my money go?”

The answer to the last question tells all. Where did your money go?

First off, did you keep records on all your expenses? If you did, then you’re off to a great start. The more information, invoices and receipts, the better. If you have all your monies paid out, saved in a database, you rule. Add it all up. All of it. From every roll of toilet paper, image set, overage charge and service fee all the way to your employees, contractors, office machines and even your accountant. Now, sit back and take a good, hard look at that tally. It’s all right if you need to a moment to catch your breath. We’ll wait.

Here’s where the going gets really tough. It’s time to play KEEP/DON’T KEEP. Surely you’ve done this in your life. If not, maybe you are more familiar with the concept of PLUS/MINUSM. This is what you’re really doing when you realize (and you will) that you’ve undoubtedly spent a lot of your coin on crap and that shit has got to stop.

Mind you, this is not a lesson in greed. This isn’t about firing a perfectly competent designer so you can hire a college flunky for half the pay. If that plugin feed is responsible for %25 of your member re-bills then you absolutely have to keep paying for it. However, take a long look at that big-breasted receptionist. She’s lovely but are you getting your calls? How about that party-boy affiliate rep you pay to spam, er, network on the message boards? Are you seeing any rise in affiliate-based profits?

PLUS or MINUS. You examine your list of expenses and you decide what the PLUSES are. Your hosting is a PLUS because you can’t have an online business without hosting. Then again, examine your bandwidth/transfer totals. Subtract downtime attributed to your host. Subtract the hours you spent on the phone with the support desk. Do you need more space or a bigger server or did you overshoot your estimates? Is your hosting package too feature-rich for your needs? Downgrade. Make a MINUS out of a PLUS. PLUSES are the people, software, hardware and services that contribute to your overall income. MINUSES are those things that don’t factor into the bottom line.

You kept the company suite stocked with Cristal during last year’s Internext. Did you add that in to your expense list? Are your employees working any harder? Wouldn’t they have worked just as hard if you had kept them housed, well fed and sober? You gave away two Hummers to high-performing affiliates, participating in your sponsor program. How many affiliates didn’t get a Hummer? What if you simply increase payouts across the board for webmasters that meet a performance criterion? If they don’t make the cut, no loss for you. Then again, it’s possible you’ll get more webmasters working for that higher payout than you will by bribing them with an obnoxious, expensive heap of metal.

Make a list of all your expenses and perform some surgery on that list. The MINUSES are there. That ad that costs too much and never gets clicks. Those three hundred domain names that you’ve leased for years and never put online. Site numbers 26 and 52 from your network that have yet to gain dividends. If you keep having to replace red Swingline Staplers at the office, stop supplying them to your sticky-fingered employees. Buy regular damned staplers. Cool factor is cool but is it cooler than money? Make your expenses list into one full of PLUSES.

As was stated, the more you make, the more you seem to spend. The one person you might forget to pay is yourself. It’s your business. You have just as much right to increases in salary as anyone under your employ. Odds are, you’re toiling more than ever before. If you’ve got the smarts to generate a profit at year’s end, you deserve a share of the booty. If you cut through the bullshit and look at your expenses in black and white ­ by creating a PLUS/MINUS list, you’ll find that gold. Cut expenses and make money!