Step away from the financial statements. There’s another way to understand the health of your company and predict the financial future. And your boss will be just as impressed.

Enter: the customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio (it’s a mouthful, so use LTV:CAC to sound fancy). The LTV:CAC ratio can help you understand your business finances outside the typical income statement, and it can give you warning signs that you may be spending too much on marketing with too little outcome.

This is the ratio between how much a customer is expected to spend during their relationship with your company and the cost of getting that customer to become a customer with you in the first place.

• It’s a common metric in marketing divisions across corporate America.
• But regardless of your job function, it’s worth understanding in case you need to pull a Beyoncé and ring the alarms about your biz model’s sustainability.

Take an example. Let’s say you sell fancy cutlery (idk, bear with me). To get customers interested in buying your product, they have to know about it, right? So you invest in Instagram ads, Times Square billboards, influencer marketing, and TV spots.

People start buying your bougie forks! That’s the goal, right? Yes, but what if your average customer buys $95 worth of forks over their lifetime (the product is so good that they only need to buy one set ever), but you’re spending $100 in marketing to get them to buy it?

This is what we call an unsustainable business model. You spend $100 to sell $95 worth of stuff? Aka your LTV:CAC ratio is 0.95? No bueno.

• One caveat: Heavy marketing spend is the name of the game for fast-growing startups with a whole lot of venture capital money in the bank. These companies are betting that the big marketing investment up front will get more customers in the door for longer, and that they’ll eventually be able to slow down on the Facebook ad buys.

But typically, the higher the ratio, the better. Now go impress your boss with this knowledge.—KL

Airbnb recently introduced Airbnb Rooms, a booking option that allows customers to select private rooms within someone’s home. Why?

• Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky spoke on a podcast (mentioned below in Links We Like) about how he fell out of love with the product.

To get more excited about the future of Airbnb, he went back to the beginning, revisiting the product when it was functionally akin to couch surfing. There, he was able to reenergize himself and the company vision, refocusing on what matters.

While you may not be responsible for the fate of a billion-dollar company, you may also find yourself falling out of love with your role. Especially after a few years in a job, you may feel disconnected from why you started in the first place. This is normal, but it's incredibly important to check back in with The Why of what got you excited in the first place.

Here are five questions to ask yourself to help fall back in love with your job.

• What made you excited about this job opportunity when you first started?
• What do you consider the biggest impact you’ve had thus far in this position?
• What potential impact could you have in the future in this role?
• What are all the lessons you’ve learned since you started? How far have you come since the beginning of this role?
• What are the other things you could be doing, and how do they compare to your current job?

Ask yourself these questions, and hopefully that spark comes back. Even in small doses, that spark can remind you of the impact you're making. But if it doesn’t, maybe it’s time to check out of your stay.

Psst. Hey, you. Do you want to make more money at work? Lean in, we’ve got a secret. If you go to the ATM on 7th and 13th and press *67, it just spits out 20-dollar bills.

If you want to go a more legal route, check out Financial Forecasting, the Brew’s one-week virtual course. You’ll:

• Prepare for H2 planning by knowing how business budgets are created
• Advocate for yourself and your team with a better understanding of how you make the company money
• Impress your friends by saying EBITDA and actually knowing what it means

Bottom line: With Financial Forecasting, you’ll be able to raise your hand for more opportunities at work and stand out among your peers.

It starts on June 5, so reserve your spot today. See you at the ATM class.

Youth is wasted on the young, and sometimes graduation speeches are too. For all the old hands out there who’ve become jaded by years of 6am alarms, crusty coffee mugs, and leftover Caesar wraps in the office kitchen, here are a few pearls of wisdom to help you set the world on fire once again—or at least get through that meeting without rage quitting.

For the next time you’re assigned a random, unappealing work project:

• “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards…Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart.”
• Steve Jobs’s iconic 2005 commencement address at Stanford (15-min runtime)

For the next time you have to work late to meet a deadline:

• “Ditch the dream and be a doer, not a dreamer.”
• Shonda Rhimes at Dartmouth in 2014 (24-min runtime)

For the next time you want to yell at a teammate for jamming the printer:

• “As a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder…To the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.”
• Novelist George Saunders at Syracuse in 2013 (11-min runtime, and also a stand-alone book)

For the next time you have to work with that deadweight coworker:

• “You can’t do it alone. As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration…No one is here today because they did it on their own. OK, maybe Josh, but he’s just a straight-up weirdo.”
• Amy Poehler at Harvard in 2011 (16-min runtime)

For the next time you start hyperventilating before a client pitch:

• “There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized.”

Conan O’Brien at Dartmouth in 2011 (24-min runtime)

Read: Ellevest CEO Sallie Krawcheck trusted her gut and stuck to her decisions, even when it felt impossible.

Listen: The Money with Katie Show chats with a writer impacted by the Hollywood writers’ strike and talks about the implications of negotiating a fair salary.

Buy: Get ahold of the next five years of your career with The Brew’s digital career mapping toolkit.

Read: Apple is known for sleek products designed for everyone. It’s breaking its own rules (paywall) with its new, experimental virtual reality headset.

Listen: How Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky rekindled the spark with his company.