Job costing, overhead, pricing, cash, crew. Written plainly, with real numbers in them, for owners running $1M–$10M trades businesses.
Revenue tells you how busy you were. It tells you nothing about whether the work was worth doing. Here is the version that does.
Most contractors calculate overhead as a percentage of last year's revenue. That method is wrong in two directions at once, and it makes every bid you send light.
A bank balance is meaningless on its own. The number that matters is how many weeks it buys you, and most owners have never worked it out.
If your hours come in over on most jobs, the problem is not your crew. It is that you are estimating from a good day and paying for an average one.
If you are winning most of what you quote, you are not good at sales. You are cheap. Here is how to price deliberately instead.
Asking what margin you should make is the wrong question. The right one is what margin your business needs, and that is arithmetic rather than opinion.
Nobody decides to give work away. It happens one small yes at a time, in the field, with nobody writing anything down.
A backlog figure in dollars is meaningless on its own. Converted to weeks of crew capacity, it becomes the earliest warning you get about pricing pressure.
The busiest year is often the one that nearly kills you. Here is the arithmetic behind why, and what to do about it.
Subs look cheaper per hour and often are not. Employees look expensive and sometimes are. The comparison most contractors run is the wrong one.
A business that cannot run without you is not an asset. It is a job with more risk and worse hours.
The lead source that produces the most leads is rarely the one that produces the most profit. Measuring the difference takes one spreadsheet column.
Ten numbers, ten minutes, every Monday. Each with the line that should worry you.
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