For an entrepreneur, thinking about revenue items helps push forward the conversation about profitability, sales growth, marketing strategy and competitive leadership. This quartet of topics leads to raising revenues, which may come from selling merchandise or providing services. Depending on the industry, a business also can make money by investing in capital markets, securities exchanges as diverse as the New York Stock Exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Nasdaq. In these markets, a company can buy and sell products such as stocks, bonds, options and futures.