$1M per employee possible?

In 2013, Tomasz Tunguz reported that Meta and Google have reached the magical threshhold of $1M in revenue generated per employee across each organization.

The latest Statista research reports $164,000 per employee being the average across US organizations.

Once you break it down into:

1. Rent, electricity, licenses, hardware, tooling
2. Marketing/sales budget
3. Other company Opex
4. Gross vs. net payroll breakdown
5. Corporate tax
6. Profit margin

The average company can hardly afford to cross the minimum six-figure ceiling for payroll alone.

Greg Isenberg, along with other supporters of AI, predicts the future of startups as an era of $1M/employee revenue opportunities for small to mid-sized organizations.

When human labor fails to scale, AI is there to help.

JPMorgan was featured in Futurism 7 years ago by cutting down 360,000 hours of finance work in a matter of seconds through their COIN program based on machine learning.

Optimizing early on, they were barely touched by the layoff wave over the past year. While 500 layoffs were announced last year, the total headcount of the bank is 240,000 – that’s 0.2% of all employees.

Market Scale also covered the architecture space and drafting a professional spec for a 100,000 square office park building. What takes about 40 hours of human labor was generated (high quality) in 42 seconds.

Hourly billing is getting questioned for a reason. But instead of fearing AI, picture this:

The same average architecture company falling into the $164k/employee bracket charging $100/hour takes 40 hours of employee time where an AI gets the job done in a minute for free (or nearly so.)

That $4K project could cost $200 instead – or a 20X drop in cost for a 2,400X increase in efficiency (2,400 plans generated in 40 hours overseen by the same employee).

So, instead of generating $4K in revenue for a week of work, the company slashes prices by 95% and makes $480,000 for a full week of plan generation.

Even though the supply vs. demand factor kicks in immediately, plus the excessive costs for advertising or demand gen… that 120X bump in productivity cannot be neglected.

This opens unprecedented opportunities for work-life balance, salary increases, shorter work weeks, remote work, and everything in-between for A-star talent worth keeping.

Or 4-hour work weeks at higher profitability.

Learn AI deeply.


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My name is Mario Peshev, a global SME Business Advisor running digital businesses for 20 the past years.

Born in Bulgaria, Europe, I gained diverse management experience through my training work across Europe, North America, and the Arab world. With 10,000+ hours in consulting and training for organizations like SAP, VMware, CERN, I’ve dedicated a huge amount of my time to helping hundreds of SMEs growing in different stages of the business lifecycle.

My martech agency DevriX grew past 50 people and ranks as a top 10 WordPress global agency and Growth Blueprint, my advisory firm, has served 400+ SME founders and executives with monthly ongoing strategy sessions.


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