A Century of Luxury & Legacy
Sales Are For Vanity, Profit Is For Sanity: A Lesson 100 Years in the Making
Published: Jul 26, 2026
Sales Are For Vanity, Profit Is For Sanity
This week I find myself in Louisville, Kentucky, attending the Independent Jewelers Organization show.
Sometimes I feel a little like Waldo.
Where in the world is Doug this week?
One week I am home, another week I am traveling, and this week I am surrounded by jewelers, vendors, education, buying opportunities, and a lot of good conversations.
And as I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about this week, I kept coming back to something that probably does not sound very exciting at first.
Numbers.
But the longer I have been in business, the more I have learned that numbers tell a story.
And sometimes they tell you a story you do not really want to hear.
Business Looked Very Different 100 Years Ago
I started thinking about my grandfather and what running a jewelry business must have looked like for him almost 100 years ago.
I can only imagine that much of his business was done in cash.
There were no credit card processors.
No online banking.
No QuickBooks.
No point-of-sale reports that you could pull up on your phone.
If there was money in your pocket, you knew you had money.
There is actually a family story about my grandfather being robbed after leaving work one evening. The robbers took the jewelry off his hands.
Afterward, he was thankful that was all they took because he had a large amount of cash in the front pocket of his coat.
His thinking was simple.
The rings were insured.
The cash was not.
That story has always stuck with me.
In some ways, running a business on cash probably made the numbers very easy to understand. You did not need to log into an app to know what your balance was.
You could probably just look in the drawer.
Then Came My Dad and Uncle
By the time my dad and uncle were running the business, things had changed.
I remember my dad having a machine that he used when writing checks. He would put the check into it, set the numbers, and run the machine across the check so the dollar amount was physically imprinted into the paper.
Then there was the big ledger book.
Everything was written down by hand.
There was another interesting part of the finances in a jewelry shop that most people probably never think about.
Gold dust.
When we polish jewelry, tiny amounts of gold come off the piece.
When we sand or file jewelry, gold comes off.
When we sweep the floor, there can be gold in that dirt.
When we wash our hands, tiny particles can even go down the sink.
So, in a jewelry shop, we save just about everything.
Polishing filters.
Vacuum bags.
Floor sweepings.
Sink traps.
All of it can eventually be sent to a refiner who separates out the precious metals.
I remember my dad storing used polishing filters in our garage at home.
Every once in a while, he would come home and start gathering them up.
My mom would see him doing it and say something like,
“Oh, we must need money.”
He would send the filters to the refiner, and there would be gold value hidden inside all that dirt and dust.
There was literally money in the garbage.
Knowing Jewelry Is Not the Same as Knowing Business
When I came into the jewelry business, I knew jewelry.
I knew how to work with my hands.
I knew how to make things.
I knew how to fix things.
But nobody really sat me down and taught me how to understand financial statements.
Nobody taught me how to read the numbers and use them to make decisions.
That became a problem.
My first company eventually ended in bankruptcy.
We knew how to make jewelry.
We just did not know enough about running a business.
There is a big difference.
Looking back, I spent a lot of years running a business almost like I was driving a car with a blindfold on.
I could see the sales.
I could look at the bank balance.
I could tell whether there was money in the account.
But those things do not necessarily tell you whether you have a healthy business.
Sales Are For Vanity. Profit Is For Sanity.
One of the sayings that has stuck with me over the years is:
Sales are for vanity. Profit is for sanity.
You can have a tremendous amount of sales and still have a terrible business.
Revenue sounds impressive.
But if there is nothing left after you pay your employees, your vendors, your rent, your insurance, your utilities, your taxes, your marketing, and all the other expenses that come with operating a business, then those sales numbers do not mean very much.
That has taken me a long time to fully appreciate.
I want our pricing to be fair.
I want our customers to receive a fair value.
I am not interested in taking advantage of anybody.
But we also have to make a fair profit.
Profit is not a dirty word.
Without profit, I cannot take care of my staff.
I cannot invest in equipment.
I cannot improve the store.
I cannot train the next generation.
And eventually there is no business left to pass along.
From Ledger Books to Artificial Intelligence
The tools we have available today are incredible compared to what my grandfather had.
I remember when personal computers started becoming part of business.
We used Peachtree Accounting for a while.
Eventually we moved to QuickBooks.
Today, I look at my point-of-sale system every day.
I watch sales.
I watch margins.
I watch expenses.
And this year we made another big change in the accounting side of the business.
We moved to Xero and started working with Accounting for Jewelers, a company that specializes in our industry.
I now have monthly coaching and consulting to help me better understand what the numbers are actually telling me.
And it has been eye-opening.
For probably the first time in my career, I feel like I have financial information that is truly helping me navigate the business instead of simply documenting what already happened.
Now AI is entering the picture too.
I will admit that artificial intelligence is both exciting and a little frightening to me.
I do not know where all of it is going.
I do not think any of us really do.
But right now, I am learning how to use it as another tool.
The ability to analyze information, look at trends, study margins, and make sense of large amounts of data is fascinating.
A hundred years ago, my grandfather might have looked into a cash drawer.
Today, I can ask technology to help me understand what thousands of transactions are telling me.
That is quite an evolution.
Building Something Worth Passing On
But the biggest reason I care about all of this today has very little to do with accounting.
It has to do with legacy.
One of my goals has always been to leave my son Joseph a legacy, not a thorn in his side.
About 12 years ago, I had a serious tractor accident.
The tractor crushed me.
Had I died that day, I would have left Joseph a mess.
That is difficult for me to admit, but it is true.
There were things in the business that lived too much inside my head.
The systems were not where they needed to be.
The financial information was not as organized as it should have been.
The business might have survived, but it would have been an enormous burden for somebody else to figure out.
Today, we are not perfect.
Far from it.
But compared to where we were 12 years ago, we are light-years ahead.
And I am grateful for that.
I am still learning.
I am still asking questions.
I am still trying to understand the numbers better.
But for the first time, I feel much more comfortable believing that what I eventually hand to the next generation can truly be called a legacy.
Not a mess.
Not a burden.
Not a collection of problems somebody else has to solve.
A legacy.
And thankfully, I am in no hurry to hand it over.
I am still having way too much fun.
Until next week,
Doug
This week I find myself in Louisville, Kentucky, attending the Independent Jewelers Organization show.
Sometimes I feel a little like Waldo.
Where in the world is Doug this week?
One week I am home, another week I am traveling, and this week I am surrounded by jewelers, vendors, education, buying opportunities, and a lot of good conversations.
And as I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about this week, I kept coming back to something that probably does not sound very exciting at first.
Numbers.
But the longer I have been in business, the more I have learned that numbers tell a story.
And sometimes they tell you a story you do not really want to hear.
Business Looked Very Different 100 Years Ago
I started thinking about my grandfather and what running a jewelry business must have looked like for him almost 100 years ago.
I can only imagine that much of his business was done in cash.
There were no credit card processors.
No online banking.
No QuickBooks.
No point-of-sale reports that you could pull up on your phone.
If there was money in your pocket, you knew you had money.
There is actually a family story about my grandfather being robbed after leaving work one evening. The robbers took the jewelry off his hands.
Afterward, he was thankful that was all they took because he had a large amount of cash in the front pocket of his coat.
His thinking was simple.
The rings were insured.
The cash was not.
That story has always stuck with me.
In some ways, running a business on cash probably made the numbers very easy to understand. You did not need to log into an app to know what your balance was.
You could probably just look in the drawer.
Then Came My Dad and Uncle
By the time my dad and uncle were running the business, things had changed.
I remember my dad having a machine that he used when writing checks. He would put the check into it, set the numbers, and run the machine across the check so the dollar amount was physically imprinted into the paper.
Then there was the big ledger book.
Everything was written down by hand.
There was another interesting part of the finances in a jewelry shop that most people probably never think about.
Gold dust.
When we polish jewelry, tiny amounts of gold come off the piece.
When we sand or file jewelry, gold comes off.
When we sweep the floor, there can be gold in that dirt.
When we wash our hands, tiny particles can even go down the sink.
So, in a jewelry shop, we save just about everything.
Polishing filters.
Vacuum bags.
Floor sweepings.
Sink traps.
All of it can eventually be sent to a refiner who separates out the precious metals.
I remember my dad storing used polishing filters in our garage at home.
Every once in a while, he would come home and start gathering them up.
My mom would see him doing it and say something like,
“Oh, we must need money.”
He would send the filters to the refiner, and there would be gold value hidden inside all that dirt and dust.
There was literally money in the garbage.
Knowing Jewelry Is Not the Same as Knowing Business
When I came into the jewelry business, I knew jewelry.
I knew how to work with my hands.
I knew how to make things.
I knew how to fix things.
But nobody really sat me down and taught me how to understand financial statements.
Nobody taught me how to read the numbers and use them to make decisions.
That became a problem.
My first company eventually ended in bankruptcy.
We knew how to make jewelry.
We just did not know enough about running a business.
There is a big difference.
Looking back, I spent a lot of years running a business almost like I was driving a car with a blindfold on.
I could see the sales.
I could look at the bank balance.
I could tell whether there was money in the account.
But those things do not necessarily tell you whether you have a healthy business.
Sales Are For Vanity. Profit Is For Sanity.
One of the sayings that has stuck with me over the years is:
Sales are for vanity. Profit is for sanity.
You can have a tremendous amount of sales and still have a terrible business.
Revenue sounds impressive.
But if there is nothing left after you pay your employees, your vendors, your rent, your insurance, your utilities, your taxes, your marketing, and all the other expenses that come with operating a business, then those sales numbers do not mean very much.
That has taken me a long time to fully appreciate.
I want our pricing to be fair.
I want our customers to receive a fair value.
I am not interested in taking advantage of anybody.
But we also have to make a fair profit.
Profit is not a dirty word.
Without profit, I cannot take care of my staff.
I cannot invest in equipment.
I cannot improve the store.
I cannot train the next generation.
And eventually there is no business left to pass along.
From Ledger Books to Artificial Intelligence
The tools we have available today are incredible compared to what my grandfather had.
I remember when personal computers started becoming part of business.
We used Peachtree Accounting for a while.
Eventually we moved to QuickBooks.
Today, I look at my point-of-sale system every day.
I watch sales.
I watch margins.
I watch expenses.
And this year we made another big change in the accounting side of the business.
We moved to Xero and started working with Accounting for Jewelers, a company that specializes in our industry.
I now have monthly coaching and consulting to help me better understand what the numbers are actually telling me.
And it has been eye-opening.
For probably the first time in my career, I feel like I have financial information that is truly helping me navigate the business instead of simply documenting what already happened.
Now AI is entering the picture too.
I will admit that artificial intelligence is both exciting and a little frightening to me.
I do not know where all of it is going.
I do not think any of us really do.
But right now, I am learning how to use it as another tool.
The ability to analyze information, look at trends, study margins, and make sense of large amounts of data is fascinating.
A hundred years ago, my grandfather might have looked into a cash drawer.
Today, I can ask technology to help me understand what thousands of transactions are telling me.
That is quite an evolution.
Building Something Worth Passing On
But the biggest reason I care about all of this today has very little to do with accounting.
It has to do with legacy.
One of my goals has always been to leave my son Joseph a legacy, not a thorn in his side.
About 12 years ago, I had a serious tractor accident.
The tractor crushed me.
Had I died that day, I would have left Joseph a mess.
That is difficult for me to admit, but it is true.
There were things in the business that lived too much inside my head.
The systems were not where they needed to be.
The financial information was not as organized as it should have been.
The business might have survived, but it would have been an enormous burden for somebody else to figure out.
Today, we are not perfect.
Far from it.
But compared to where we were 12 years ago, we are light-years ahead.
And I am grateful for that.
I am still learning.
I am still asking questions.
I am still trying to understand the numbers better.
But for the first time, I feel much more comfortable believing that what I eventually hand to the next generation can truly be called a legacy.
Not a mess.
Not a burden.
Not a collection of problems somebody else has to solve.
A legacy.
And thankfully, I am in no hurry to hand it over.
I am still having way too much fun.
Until next week,
Doug