Listen Anywhere
Every summer plays out the same way. The phone doesn’t stop, the calendar is full through August, and the revenue numbers look like the best year you’ve had. Then the quarter closes, you sit down with your accountant, and the profit line doesn’t match the effort. Somewhere between the top and the bottom of that P&L, the money went somewhere.
Peak season brings peak expenses. Overtime, fuel, materials, tariffs, subs you had to bring in to cover overflow. Most of it happens fast enough that nobody’s tracking it until it’s already spent.
The costs you stopped noticing
Johny’s advice here is simple and most owners skip it: pull your credit card statements and go line by line.
He gave an example from a company in his complex. They’d gotten busy and were sending drawings out to a print shop constantly for their site foremen. Averaging somewhere between $2,200 and $2,500 a month. Nobody flagged it because each individual invoice looked reasonable. It was just the cost of being busy.
He told them to call a plotter company and ask about renting. They now have the plotter sitting in their own office for $900 a month, paper and ink included. No delivery fees, no runs to pick anything up. That’s over half the cost gone, and it also gave a foreman back the time he used to spend driving.
Nobody catches that in the middle of a busy month. You catch it when you sit down on purpose and look.
The pattern repeats at smaller scale everywhere. Sixty bucks here, a coffee run there, a tool you bought because it was easier than finding the one you already own. Each one is defensible on its own. Add them up across a quarter and they’re a real percentage of your margin.
A quarterly expense audit is one of the highest-return hours a contractor can spend, and it’s usually the first thing that gets pushed. Do it once and you’ll find something.
Growth and expenses move together
Here’s the part that catches people who are scaling.
If you’re doing $100k a year at 50% margin and you decide to double, the goal isn’t just hitting $200k. The goal is hitting $200k while keeping what it costs you to run the company proportional. If it took $50k of expenses to produce that first $100k, you want the doubled version to cost around $100k, not $140k.
Growth that outruns your expense structure feels like success right up until you look at the bottom line. More revenue with worse margins means you took on more risk, more headaches, and more payroll for less actual money in your pocket.
Before you commit to doubling, figure out what the doubled version costs to operate. That number decides whether growth is worth it.
Should you raise prices when you’re booked solid?
This is where Kosta and Johny disagreed, and the disagreement is worth sitting with.
Kosta’s angle: if you’re packed through July with no gaps, that’s a market signal. Supply and demand. You could be underpriced, and instead of squeezing margin out of the expense side, you could take it on the revenue side.
Johny pushed back hard. His position is that your regular clients are your regular clients, and raising a price on them because you happen to be busy damages a relationship you’ve spent years building. He’d rather tell someone he can’t get to them until September. His brother runs an irrigation company and is jammed from April to September every year, not because he’s cheap and not because he gouges, but because he’s the best in his area and people wait for him.
The one exception Johny allows: if a client needs you to squeeze them in and that means another job suffers, there’s a premium, and you have the conversation about it upfront. That’s compensation for the disruption you’re absorbing.
Both positions land in the same place once you strip the framing away. Your price should reflect the quality of your work. If you carry proper insurance, pay your guys real wages, run clean trucks, and show up when you say you will, you should not be priced against the company doing none of that. Being the same price as a fly-by-night outfit doesn’t make you competitive. It makes you look like you belong in the same category.
That’s a market adjustment, not a squeeze on your existing clients. There’s a difference, and clients can feel it.
Overhead and profit are two separate calculations
A quick technical point Johny made that a lot of contractors get wrong.
If you need 7% overhead and 10% profit, you don’t take your cost and add 17%. You take your cost, add your overhead to get a new number, then apply your profit percentage to that number. The two calculations compound. Doing it the flat way quietly costs you money on every single job, and the bigger the job, the bigger the gap.
Also worth being able to explain: when a job that priced at $75,000 last year comes in at $90,000 this year, most of that increase is material cost, not your margin. Copper alone has moved substantially. Being able to break that out for a client, line by line, is the difference between looking expensive and looking accurate.
Saying no is a pricing decision
The best closers in business are often the ones willing to walk away.
Johny doesn’t price for anyone he hasn’t had a real conversation with. Cold bid requests from an estimator he’s exchanged two emails with go nowhere. His reasoning: putting together a proper price consumes real resources, and if there’s no relationship, you’re spending your time helping someone else win a job with no realistic path to being the one who does it.
Asked whether he’d ever bid one of those in the early days, the answer was yes. Asked how it went: it ended in a lawsuit. And when he asked around the industry afterward, multiple people told him they’d have warned him off that company if he’d called first.
Watch for the dangling carrot. “Do this one cheap and I’ve got a bigger one coming.” The counter is straightforward: price this one at fair market value, see how we work together, see whether you pay on time, and then we can talk about the second one.
Newer companies take these jobs out of fear. The fear is that saying no means the revenue disappears and doesn’t come back. In practice the bad clients are the ones who eat your margin, your crew’s morale, and eventually your receivables.
Call someone who’s been through it
If you’re one or two years in, the highest-value thing you can do is find a veteran who’ll answer a question. Not a formal mentor with a calendar commitment. Someone who will take a five-minute call and tell you whether a deal smells right.
When you’re young and hungry, you’re also naive, and naive is exactly what the dangling carrot is designed to catch. One phone call before you sign can save you from a receivable that bankrupts your company.
Recurring work is your hedge against the fall
After Labour Day, a lot of seasonal trades fall off a cliff. Landscaping, roofing, parts of HVAC. The way through it is work that repeats.
Johny’s clearest example came from COVID. His company went from thirty guys to three, and the only thing that kept the lights on for the first eight months was service and maintenance. Things break regardless of what the economy is doing.
Not every trade fits a residential maintenance plan. Kosta floated electricians doing annual panel inspections and Johny disagreed, arguing homeowners won’t pay for it and smart devices already cover the smoke alarm angle. Where preventative maintenance clearly does work is condos and industrial, stack flushings, pump checks, hot water tank inspections, anywhere a failure takes down a whole building. And on high-end custom homes, where the client understands what a backed-up underground drain costs.
For the trades that don’t fit a maintenance contract, the equivalent is a service division. A drywall company doing new installs can keep one person on patch repairs. Same-day and next-day work is a steady revenue stream, and it’s the work that keeps coming when new construction slows.
Then there’s the category most contractors don’t think about at all. A professional dog waste removal company in Alberta running 70 jobs a day at five minutes each. Bin cleaning companies coming monthly. Mobile detailers charging $150 a month for something a car wash membership does worse for double. A seventeen year old with a four-wheeler, a trailer, and a mower doing fifteen houses a day, five days a week, six or seven months a year, who has no interest in growing because his clients trust him and he makes enough.
The common thread is repeatable work with a predictable schedule and a predictable invoice.
The reason more companies don’t offer it is admin. Remembering who’s due, building the schedule, generating the invoices, chasing the ones that don’t get paid. That’s the part software handles now. Jobtable’s recurring jobs let you set the schedule once and the invoices go out on their own, so the back office stops being the reason you say no to recurring work.
👉 Learn more at https://www.jobtable.com
One thing to do this week
Pull your last three months of credit card statements and go through them line by line. Not with your accountant. You. Find the $2,200 printing bill hiding in your business, because there’s almost certainly one in there.
Then ask the harder question: of the jobs you took last quarter, how many would you take again at that price, with that client?