The aim of this work is to identify the determining factors for company profitability and its use in the design of management guidelines. The methodology focuses on an analysis of the traditional theoretical models, through the method of factorial analysis. The principal results show that the traditional models are valid for explaining profitability in a sample of small, medium and large Chilean companies. Furthermore, it was also detected that the ability of the traditional models to explain profitability directly increases with the size of the company. Finally, the results show that the ability of the traditional models to explain profitability is higher when the models are considered as a whole, and not as individual and excluding variables.