Katharos Property Care — a cleaning company serving apartments and Airbnbs in the South Florida area was about to launch.
The owners were confident in their idea, but they needed to know if the numbers actually made sense before going all in with the business. That’s when they decided to reach out to me. No clean data, no confirmed costs — just a real question that deserved a real answer.
I built a financial model from scratch in Excel. Unit economics, break-even analysis, monthly projections, and three scenarios to stress-test the assumptions. One inputs sheet, everything else cascades automatically.
Along the way, I caught a double-counting error in the supply costs. This was a small mistake, but if left unnoticed it would’ve quietly distorted every single number downstream.
But the most important thing I found wasn’t an error — it was a reframe in the business question.
Once the model was done, it became very clear that in order to break-even, very few jobs per month were required. Pricing wasn’t the problem at all. The real risk was something the owners didn’t even consider: demand consistency. Would customers keep coming back?
That small but important insight changed the entire early strategy — from optimizing costs to building a steady pipeline.
That’s exactly what this project taught me about what actual good analysis does. It doesn’t just answer the question you were asked. It finds the question you should’ve been asking.
Eduardo Soto — Data Analyst