What is revenue?
Revenue is the total money a business takes in from selling what it sells, before anything is paid out. Sales, turnover, top line: same thing.
It is called the top line because it sits at the top of the page, and everything below it is subtraction.
What is profit?
Profit is what remains after every cost has come out.
Wages, materials, rent, software, fuel, insurance, the accountant, the card processing fees, and your own time if you are honest about it. What survives all of that is profit, and profit is the only part you can actually use.
Why do men chase the wrong one?
Because revenue is social and profit is private.
At a table of men, somebody asks what the business did last year. Nobody asks what it kept. So a man learns to answer with a number that sounds like an achievement, and over time he starts steering toward the number he gets asked about.
There is a second reason. Revenue is easy to move. Cut your price, chase volume, take work you should refuse, and revenue climbs within a month. Profit takes longer and involves saying no, which is harder than saying yes.
What does the gap tell you?
The gap between the two is the business.
Two men can both take in three hundred thousand dollars. One keeps ninety, the other keeps eleven. They are not in the same job. The first has a business. The second has an expensive way of being busy.
When the gap is thin, adding customers makes it worse, because every new sale brings its costs with it. That is why a struggling operation that doubles its revenue often gets closer to failing rather than further from it.