Ask an owner how last month went and you’ll get a feeling, not a number. “Good.” “Slammed.” “Brutal.” What you almost never hear is the one number that would actually settle it. I’ve watched a sharp operator ride a “great, busy month” straight into the red, because all that busy never covered the real costs. And I’ve watched that same operator beat themselves up over a “slow” month that quietly cleared them with room to spare. Same shop, two months, and the scoreboard was exactly backwards — because they were keeping score by how tired they felt, and the number I’m about to give you doesn’t care how tired you feel.
The number you have to make before you’ve made anything.
We built it together already; you just haven’t named it. It’s that pile of costs that shows up whether you work or not — the truck payments, the insurance, the yard, the phone, the bookkeeper. In your two-truck shop, about $6,100, due every month, full height, whether you turned a wrench or took the month off.
Here’s the hard truth in that number: you don’t keep a single dollar until your work has covered all $6,100 of it. Not your first dollar of profit — your first dollar, period. The pros call this “break-even.” For us normal people, it’s the nut: the number you have to make before you’ve made anything at all.
And the nut has no memory and no mercy. It resets to full every month. A slow January doesn’t earn you a smaller February. You climb the same wall twelve times a year, and it’s the same height every time.
What it looks like in your shop.
You’ve got the two numbers you need, and you found them both these last two months.
One is your nut: the $6,100 in bills that land whether you work or not. The other is what your work leaves behind after each job covers its own materials and fuel, about $24,000 in a normal month. Line them up, because the relationship between them is the whole game.
So here’s the only division that matters. Your nut is about a quarter of what you leave behind. Which means, roughly, the first week of every month you work entirely for the landlord and the insurance company. Every leftover dollar in that stretch is just climbing the nut. You don’t earn a dime for yourself until it’s covered — and only then does the rest of the month actually start paying you.
Flip it around and it’s even plainer: you need somewhere around $10,000 of work through the door every month just to get back to zero. Do less than that, however busy you were, and you paid for the privilege of working.
What to do Monday.
Nothing to calculate this time — you already have it. Just write your nut somewhere you’ll see it: the whiteboard in the shop, the top of your calendar, the back of your hand. $6,100. That’s the wall.
Then use it, once, this way: think back on your last “good” month and your last “bad” one and ask the only question that actually scores them — did the work clear the nut, or didn’t it? Not “was I busy.” Not “did it feel rough.” Did the leftover climb the wall? That’s the whole scoreboard, and now you own it.
And here’s the part only you can do.
Knowing your nut won’t make a slow month busy. What it does is quieter and worth more: it tells you the truth in real time, so you stop taking a losing month as a personal failing and stop celebrating a busy one that actually lost you money. It turns “how’d we do?” from a gut feeling into a number you can stand on. And once you can see the wall clearly, you can start making the calls that clear it on purpose — which work to take, which to pass, what to charge on the next call. The nut is the most honest number in your business precisely because it won’t flatter you. Neither will I. That’s the whole point of us. You’ve been climbing this wall every month for years, on instinct. Now you can see it — and that changes everything about how you decide.
— MJ
Next time: once the nut’s covered, what the very next job actually has to beat — and why the job that looks too cheap to take might be the most profitable one you run all week.
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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: check.wr0ngwaay.com
Earlier: What a Job Actually Leaves Behind
Or read the whole run in the archive →