Spot It.
Your team is working hard. The schedule is full, the phone keeps ringing and you are even turning work away. Yet at the end of the year the profit is thin, sometimes barely enough to justify the effort and the risk. It feels like running faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
Sight It.
Being busy and being profitable are two different things. We usually find a mix of prices set too low, costs that crept up unnoticed and work that takes longer than it was quoted. Some customers or job types quietly lose money, but they hide inside the overall totals. Overtime, rework and small giveaways add up. Without job-level or product-level numbers, it is hard to see where the profit is leaking.
Solve It.
Find out where the profit goes:
- Pick your last 10 jobs or your top 10 products and work out the actual profit on each.
- Compare what you quoted with the time and materials each one really took.
- Identify the two or three types of work that earn the most, and the ones that earn the least.
- Raise prices or change terms on the weakest work, or decide to stop doing it.
- Track profit by job or product going forward, not just total sales.
Less work at a healthy margin often beats more work at a thin one.
Fixed it yourself? Great. Want help making it stick? Talk to a Troubleshooter.