I’ve sat across the desk from more than one owner holding their best sales month ever and a checking account that flat disagreed. Biggest month on the board, and somehow less in the bank than the slow month before it. They’d point at the revenue like it settled the argument, and I’d have to be the one to say: that’s what you ran through the shop. It isn’t what the shop kept. Those are two different numbers, and the daylight between them is where good years quietly go bad.
Because “we did $40,000 this month” tells you almost nothing by itself. It doesn’t say a word about what it cost to do that $40,000. And until you know that, you can’t tell a great month from a merely busy one — and busy has closed more doors than slow ever did.
The number under the number.
Take one job, any job. Subtract just the costs that job dragged in the door with it: the materials, the fuel to get out there, the dumpster, the sub you paid for the day. What’s left is what that job actually left behind for you. The pros call it “contribution margin.” For us normal people, it’s what the job put in your pocket after it paid for its own boots.
That leftover — not the invoice — is the only part of the job that ever walks toward the bills. Remember that $6,100 wall from last time, the fixed pile that shows up whether you work or not? This is what climbs it. The invoice makes the noise. The leftover does the work.
What it looks like in your shop.
Two weeks, your two trucks.
Week one, a trophy lands: a $10,000 job, the kind you tell people about. But it’s material-heavy — copper, a couple of units, a sub for the tie-in — and by the time the dust settles, $9,200 of it walked right back out the door. It left behind $800. And it ate both trucks for the week, so nothing else got done.
Week two, no trophies. Four ordinary calls, $2,000 apiece. Materials and fuel ran about $800 each, so every one left behind $1,200. Four of them: $4,800 left behind — in the same week the $10,000 job left $800.
Same trucks, same crew, same town. The “small” week kept six times what the “big” week did. Sort your month by the size of the invoice and you’ll chase precisely the wrong work, feel great doing it, and wonder where it all went.
What to do Monday.
You already did the hard part last month, when you split your shop into what moves with the work and what comes anyway. Go grab those two numbers. Your $40,000 month, and the ~$16,000 that rode out the door with the jobs — the copper, the fuel, the dumpsters.
One subtraction: forty grand minus sixteen. Twenty-four thousand.
That’s the whole assignment. And that $24,000 — not the $40,000 — is what actually showed up to fight your bills. A third of your “biggest month ever” was never yours; it was just passing through on its way to the supply house. You didn’t chase down a single receipt to see it. You already had the numbers. You’d just never lined them up that way.
And here’s the part only you can do.
Doing that job by job — which calls leave the most behind, which ones only look big — that’s real work, the kind a good tool will someday do for you in the time it takes to pour a coffee. You don’t have to become your own bookkeeper to run this business well. But you do get to carry the question, and it’s a good one. Next time a big job rolls in and everybody’s grinning at the number, ask what it’ll actually leave behind once it pays for its own boots. Sometimes the answer is “plenty.” Sometimes it’s “eight hundred bucks and both trucks for a week.” Knowing the difference isn’t arithmetic — it’s the judgment that keeps a good shop good. And you’ve had it all along.
— MJ
Next time: how much your shop has to leave behind every single month before one dollar is actually yours. I call it the nut, and it’s the most honest number in your business.
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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.
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Earlier: The Bills That Come Whether You Work or Not
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