Up from $2,300 per crew day, an 89.8% increase once the scorecard went live.
Down from 18%, while overall gross margin held steady near 51%.
Up from roughly $4.2 million three years earlier, pacing toward $10–12 million.
Peak monthly run rate, up from $370,000 a month at the start of the record.
A foundation repair and waterproofing company scheduling crews by the calendar day installed a weekly scorecard tracking gross profit per crew day, and used it to cut labor costs while nearly doubling field profit yield.
Home service crews scheduled by the calendar day can bleed profit a monthly report never catches, because nobody is tracking the labor hours the job needs. At one foundation repair and waterproofing company, daily gross profit per crew sat near $2,300 for years. A new line on the weekly production scorecard pushed it to $4,367.
Owner Grant (not his real name) worked with Stuart Trier of Clear Results to build that scorecard around one line: gross profit dollars per crew, per working day. Direct labor costs fell from 18% of revenue to 13% within roughly six to eight months.
By the fall of 2023, the business looked healthy from a distance. Monthly production ran around $370,000, the schedule stayed booked eight to ten weeks out, and revenue was on pace for roughly $4.2 million that year. Underneath that, a scheduling habit was eating margin nobody was tracking closely enough to see.
Crews were assigned jobs in calendar days. Nobody measured the labor hours a job required. A three-day job meant three calendar days on the board, whether the work took 18 hours or 30. A crew that finished early sometimes just went home; a crew running behind stretched into the third day without anyone logging it as a cost. Direct labor crept up to 18% of revenue against a 12% target, and daily gross profit per crew sat at roughly $2,300, a figure nobody had isolated closely enough to catch.
Grant sensed something was wrong before he could name it. On a call that September, he described trying to reconcile the business in his head against what the bank account showed:
"Where is that $55,000 at? That's what I can't put my finger on. Why am I not making it? I knew it mentally in my head. I've never put the numbers down like this." — Grant
How does a business booked eight weeks out not know where its own profit went? Revenue got tracked on a monthly basis, so a labor overrun on one job didn't surface until the numbers rolled up weeks later, and by then the crew had moved on to three more jobs. Jobs were getting done. Revenue was coming in. The business just couldn't account for its own profit, because nothing measured crew performance on a timescale short enough to catch it happening.
Gross Profit Per Crew Day is the dollar profit a crew generates on one working day, after subtracting the job's direct costs (materials and crew wages) from what the job billed. It's a field-level number, distinct from anything a company-wide P&L reports, and most contractors never calculate it because their financial reporting stops there.
Here's a worked example. A three-person crew completes a $6,000 installation in a day and a half. Materials and crew wages together cost $2,000, leaving $4,000 in gross profit. Divide that by 1.5 days worked, and the crew generated $2,667 in gross profit per day. That would read as underperforming against a $3,500 target, even though the job itself was profitable on paper.
The change started as one new column on the weekly production scorecard: gross profit dollars per crew day, color-coded against a target. Anything at $3,500 a day or above read green, and anything under $2,800 read red — the middle band, $2,800 to $3,500, read orange. A red day required an explanation from the production manager at the next weekly review.
Scheduling changed alongside it. Instead of blocking a job for "three days," foremen were told the exact labor-hour budget behind the job: 26 hours for a job that used to get three calendar days penciled in, before the crew ever left the shop. Stuart called it the metric that connected pricing, scheduling, and crew efficiency into a line anyone could read in seconds, on a July 2025 call.
Does handing a foreman a fixed labor-hour budget change how a job gets run, in place of a vague calendar deadline? Within weeks it did. Foremen stopped checking their numbers after payroll ran and started pre-calculating labor hours against job revenue before the truck left on Monday morning, the difference between looking through the windshield and checking the rearview mirror, as Stuart put it. Grant put it directly to his team:
"I'm telling them, hey, you've got twenty-six hours on this job, not three days. You can't work forty-nine hours or sixty hours and bring in thirty thousand dollars. I need you bringing in thirty thousand dollars. If you want to make more money, then go do thirty-five thousand in forty-nine hours." — Grant
A fellow contractor in Grant's peer group, hearing the production manager mention gross profit per day on a call, was visibly surprised. Most operators at that scale had never heard another business track that exact metric, let alone build a weekly rhythm around it.
Grant briefly adopted a third-party performance-pay platform to automate crew bonus calculations. Its formula shifted payout dollars away from foremen and toward junior technicians, the opposite of what the scorecard was meant to reward.
One of the foremen caught it first, sitting down with Grant and a laptop to walk through the math line by line. The math checked out: the software was penalizing exactly the people running the most profitable jobs. With two experienced foremen close to walking, Grant scrapped the third-party platform and reverted to the company's own spreadsheet, where every crew member could see precisely how their own gross-profit figure was calculated.
A scorecard only holds up if the crew trusts the math behind it. Reversing course in front of the whole team, instead of patching the formula behind closed doors, is what kept that trust intact.
| What Changed | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Gross profit per crew day | Roughly $2,300, untracked | $4,367, tracked weekly |
| Direct labor cost | 18% of revenue | 13% of revenue |
| Scheduling unit | Calendar days ("a 3-day job") | Budgeted labor hours (e.g., 26 hours) |
| Monthly production | $370,000 | Up to $791,000 |
| Annual revenue | Roughly $4.2 million | $7.0 million+, pacing toward $10–12 million |
| Foreman planning habit | Rearview mirror: costs reviewed after payroll | Windshield: labor hours pre-budgeted before dispatch |
Crew time is the product in roofing, plumbing, HVAC, and foundation repair alike, and any business selling it without a labor-hour budget behind the schedule loses margin the same way.
A roofing crew booked for "two days" on a tear-off and reroof will often take exactly two days, whether the job needed 16 crew-hours or 28, because the calendar slot expands to fill itself. Pricing the job's labor hours before the crew arrives, and pulling a dump trailer and materials into place the night before, keeps two calendar days from becoming three.
An HVAC company running same-day service calls runs into a related bottleneck. A technician paid an hourly wage, with no target tied to the visit, has little reason to close a repair in 90 minutes rather than three hours, so easy calls absorb time that belonged to a second or third job that day. Tracking gross profit per technician day, calculated the way a crew's is per job day, catches a slow call within the week, before the details fade.
Foremen resist hearing about a bad week only after it's already over, when nothing they say can change what happened, not the hard numbers themselves. Handing a foreman the labor-hour budget before the truck leaves entirely changes the conversation: the weekly review becomes a walk-through of what happened on site, rather than a lecture about a figure nobody explained in advance.
The formula: job revenue, minus materials, minus crew wages, divided by crew days worked. A monthly P&L reports the same underlying figures 30 to 45 days after the fact, once a labor overrun is money already spent. Running that formula every week, crew by crew, catches the overrun with jobs left on the calendar to correct course.
Rain, a rotted subfloor, unmapped rock: none of that is the crew's fault. What the scorecard catches is the pattern behind a red day. A rotted subfloor usually traces back to a missed step in sales pre-qualification, while a crew idling on a late materials delivery traces back to staging. Reviewing the cause every week catches that difference before it repeats.
A job blocked off as "two calendar days" becomes exactly that: a crew paces itself to fill 16 hours, whether the work needs 10 or 20. Pricing that job by its exact labor-hour budget works differently. A $6,000 job with $2,000 in materials might cap out at 10 technician hours to hit a $3,500 daily target, and the crew's remaining hours free up for another job within the week.
The weekly upkeep runs under 15 minutes once the scorecard exists. A production coordinator enters three figures per completed job (revenue, material cost, and labor hours worked), and a simple spreadsheet formula does the rest, automatically color-coding the result. The owner's job is a five-minute visual scan and a short weekly conversation about whatever reads red.
Most home service coaching programs stop at handing over a template and checking in once a month, leaving the owner to nag the team into filling it out. Stuart Trier's team at Clear Results builds the follow-through into the scorecard line itself: a red day automatically gets an explanation at the next weekly review, with nobody having to remember to chase it down.
Stuart Trier is the Founder and CEO of Clear Results. Over the past 20 years, Stuart has built, bought, and sold 11 companies across the home service, healthcare, and marketing industries. He built his first company from startup to $8M in revenue in 3 years before a successful exit, then built a chain of 28 healthcare clinics and sold the business to a publicly traded company. Following that acquisition, Stuart spent 3 years working alongside the CEO, helping lead the organization through a take-private transaction before participating in a nine-figure exit to a Fortune 10 company. Today, he's the lead investor behind an electrical services platform operating across 3 U.S. states, and has worked directly with owners through 1,800+ strategic advisory sessions.
