For CEOs of $1M–$50M companies
If your sales miss by 10% next year, what happens to your profit?
Hint: it's not 10%. Find the revenue number where your company stops making money, then throw 2027 at it and watch what breaks.
- Three answers, rounded is fine
- Nothing uploaded. Your numbers stay in this browser
- Industry defaults from NYU Stern, January 2026
Powered by the Breaking-Point Method from Insight Consultants, built on established finance frameworks. See the method
How we got this
Test 2 · 2027 curveballs
Throw 2027 at your company
Where does 2027 start before any curveballs?
Turn on anything that could happen next year, and drag to set how hard it hits.
Step 2 of the Breaking-Point Method · Scenario stress testing and the cash conversion cycle
The storm turns on four common hits for your industry at once. It's a hypothetical bundle, not a forecast.
Curveballs
Your moves
Investments
More curveballs and moves
Test 3 · The fix
Win your profit back
Step 3 of the Breaking-Point Method · Profit levers and pricing research
Which lever matters most for your company?
Profit lever analysis, shown as a tornado chart
What happens to your yearly profit if each driver moves just 1%, one at a time. Biggest effect on top.
Each driver moves on its own. The bars show impact, not how hard each 1% is to achieve.
Your result
Your 2027 budget, built from the scenarios you just tested
A planning starting point, before tax and interest.
Simplified cash flow = operating profit minus the change in receivables, stock and payables. Before tax, interest, depreciation, equipment and loan payments.
Take it with you
An Excel budget planner with your scenarios built in, and a monthly tracker that compares your actual numbers with your breaking point. We'll email it to you.
Free 30-minute call with our experts
Your breaking point is a number. Moving it is a plan.
Bring this test to a 30-minute call with an Insight Consultants advisor. You'll leave with three things:
- The curveball that would hurt you most in 2027, and how early you'd see it coming
- The one lever worth pulling first, sized in dollars for your business
- A 2027 budget your bank and your board will believe
Free. No slides, no sales pitch. Just your numbers.
Our method
The Breaking-Point Method
Three tests by Insight Consultants, built on established finance frameworks.
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1
Find your breaking point
Cost-volume-profit analysis · degree of operating leverage
Finds the sales level where profit hits zero, and why profit falls faster than sales.
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2
Stress-test 2027
Scenario stress testing · cash conversion cycle · driver-based planning
Applies realistic 2027 shocks to profit and cash, and turns them into a budget.
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3
Fix it
Profit lever analysis · tornado chart · published pricing research
Shows what each lever must deliver to win profit back, and which one matters most for you.
How the math works, and what it doesn't do
Break-even analysis, the standard way
Your costs split into two kinds. Variable costs (materials, freight, commissions) rise and fall with sales. Fixed costs (salaries, rent, software, insurance) don't. Every dollar of sales leaves a slice, called the contribution margin, to cover fixed costs.
Breaking point = fixed costs ÷ contribution margin
Because fixed costs don't shrink when sales do, profit swings much harder than revenue. Finance textbooks call this operating leverage:
% change in profit ≈ % change in sales × (contribution ÷ profit)
Where the defaults come from
If you skip a question, we use industry-wide figures from Professor Aswath Damodaran's datasets at NYU Stern (January 2026). They are sector totals for US public companies, not the typical small company, and those companies are larger than yours. Treat them as a starting point. Your own numbers always win.
Profit means operating profit before interest and tax (EBIT), which matches the NYU Stern operating margin.
We treat cost of goods sold as variable and overheads as fixed. That's the textbook simplification, and the biggest assumption in any break-even model. Some businesses carry fixed staff inside cost of goods (clinics, agencies, consultancies). Entering your own gross margin replaces our industry estimate with your numbers.
What this does not do
- It doesn't forecast your sales. You choose the curveballs.
- Profit is operating profit before interest and tax. A business with large loans has a higher breaking point once interest is paid.
- The cash figure is simplified: operating profit minus cash tied up in receivables, stock and payables. It leaves out tax, interest, depreciation, equipment and loan payments.
- It's a planning starting point, not a complete budget. Costs are spread evenly across the year unless you change them in the Excel file.
- It assumes your sales mix stays the same. A shift toward low-margin products moves the breaking point too.
- It isn't accounting, tax or investment advice.