Long before the lab business, I ran the operations for a trash company. Sixty-some trucks, and I walked in thinking I already knew what they were worth. My regional boss set me straight in about ninety seconds. He walked me out to the yard mid-morning, pointed at a truck sitting there — clean, paid for, ready — and asked me what it was worth. I started to give him the number off the books. He cut me off. “Right now? Nothing. A truck’s only worth something when it’s bumping containers. Sitting here, it’s a very expensive lawn ornament.”
That stuck. It changed how I read the whole fleet. When a route dried up and trucks went idle, we didn’t let them sit around looking like assets on a page. We shipped the spares to another division that could keep them busy. Because a truck you own and don’t run isn’t an asset. It’s a bill with a paint job.
You’ve got the exact same yard. It’s just smaller.
The expensive stuff only counts when it’s working.
Here’s a number nobody writes on the whiteboard: what your equipment earns when it’s not earning. And the answer is always the same — nothing. Worse than nothing, because it’s still costing you.
Remember from way back in issue one: the truck payment lands on the 1st whether that truck ran two thousand miles or sat in the yard all month. So every day it sits is a day you paid full price for zero work. The pros call this “return on assets” and make it sound like a final exam. For us normal people, it’s just this: is your expensive stuff earning its keep, or is it being lazy?
An asset isn’t valuable because you own it. It’s valuable because it’s working. Parked, that shiny thing you’re so proud of is just a fixed cost wearing a nicer outfit.
What it looks like in your shop.
Take your second truck. Say it’s all-in about $1,500 a month once you count the payment, its share of the insurance, the registration, the odd repair. That number doesn’t move. It’s the same in a busy week and a dead one.
Now be honest about how often it actually rolls. If truck number two only goes out two days out of five — the first truck handles most of the load, and number two is there “for when we’re slammed” — then you’re paying full freight for a truck that works about 40% of the time. The other 60%? That’s lazy money. Fixed cost, zero return, sitting in your yard looking like an asset.
And here’s where it gets expensive in a way that feels like success: you have a couple of big weeks, everybody’s slammed, and the gut says buy a third truck. But if trucks one and two are already idle half the time, a third truck doesn’t add capacity. It adds a third payment to sit in the same yard. You didn’t buy growth. You bought a second lazy asset and a bigger insurance bill.
The move is almost always the other one first: wake up what you already own. Fill number two’s idle days — the marginal job we talked about last time, the empty seat before the gate closes — before you ever sign for number three. The cheapest truck you’ll ever add is the one already sitting in your yard.
One line I won’t cross, and neither should you.
Everything I just said is about steel. Trucks, tools, that excavator, the building. It is not about people, and the difference matters more than any number in this letter.
An idle machine is a spreadsheet problem — you sell it, you rent it out, you put it to work, and nobody gets hurt. An idle person on your payroll is not “lazy money.” That’s a livelihood, and nine times out of ten a slow team member is a leadership gap, not an asset problem — work you didn’t hand them, training they never got, a direction nobody set. Run the truck math on a human being and you’ll make a cold decision about the one thing in your business that was never a line item. The person is the point. Do the utilization math on your equipment all day long. Never on your people.
What to do Monday.
No spreadsheet. Walk your yard Monday morning and just look. Everything sitting still that you’re still making payments on — that’s your lazy money, in plain sight.
Now point at the single most expensive thing out there and ask one question you already know the answer to: how many days did that actually earn last month? Not “was it here if I needed it.” Did it work. If the honest answer is “not many,” you’ve found one of two things — money you’re leaving on the table, waiting for you to put that thing to work, or a check you should stop writing. Either one is worth knowing before you spend a dollar on anything new.
And here’s the part only you can do.
The trap was never owning expensive things. It’s owning them and forgetting to ask the question — because a paid-for truck in the yard feels like security. It’s yours, it’s ready, it’s there. But “ready” isn’t “earning,” and a business can get slowly, proudly heavier with stuff that isn’t pulling its weight until one day it can’t get out of its own way. Nobody makes that mistake in a single bad call. You make it one comfortable purchase at a time.
So the discipline isn’t complicated, it’s just hard to hold: don’t fall in love with your own equipment. Make every expensive thing you own either earn its keep or go. That’s not a finance skill — it’s the difference between a shop that grows and one that just accumulates. And here’s the good news buried in it: you very likely don’t need to buy your way to a better year. You need the stuff you’ve already got to quit being lazy. That’s a faster win, a cheaper one, and it’s sitting in your yard right now waiting on you to notice.
— MJ
Next time: the best-looking year of your life — records on every wall, everybody busy, the phone never quiet — and why that’s exactly the year that can quietly break you.
—
Pass it on. If you know someone running a shop who’d rather be told the truth than sold a service, send them this one.
The tools are free. Six of them, no sign-up, and they run on your own numbers: realitycheckcfo.com
Earlier: What the Next Job Has to Beat
Or read the whole run in the archive →