Produced in March across 36 completed jobs, the best month in the company's history.
Down from daily site visits and troubleshooting calls just 2 months earlier.
Down from a historical 27.1% of revenue.
Up from a baseline in the high 50s, on the same crews and the same pricing.
A waterproofing contractor closing in on $2.5 million in revenue had a quiet ceiling. The owner was still the last word on every hard job-site call. Clear Results installed a dedicated field production role instead, and the company posted its best month on record the same quarter.
At $2.42 million in annual revenue, a waterproofing and foundation-repair contractor had already built more infrastructure than most home service businesses its size: extended-hours phone intake, a documented pricing floor, a growing referral partnership. None of it changed the reality. The owner was still the only person crews could call when a job went sideways. Clear Results installed a Field Production Lead role under the Team Engine, with daily SOPs and a pre-construction walk protocol to back it up. Within roughly 60 days, the owner had stepped back from job sites completely, and the company closed a $322,000 production month at 65% gross profit, the best month in its history.
Weston (not his real name) had grown his waterproofing and foundation-repair company by roughly 30% a year for 3 years running, closing out 2025 at $2.42 million. By his own count, he rarely worked a sales call anymore. He'd hired 2 additional phone staff, sent a crew to Chicago for specialized crack-repair training, and built a referral pipeline with a national foundation-repair brand. From the outside, that reads like a business running itself.
It wasn't. Whenever a job hit a technical snag (an unexpected trench condition, a layout question, a customer walking a crew through a change mid-install) the call went straight to Weston or his production director, no matter who was already standing on the job site. "I'm working on fixing job site productivity," Weston told Stuart Trier, Clear Results' founder, early in the engagement. "My goal is to shave a day off of all of our jobs right now. That was the goal, and that's the goal I've been throwing at my production director, and he was just drowning."
The production director wasn't slacking; he was absorbing 2 jobs at once. He managed warehouse ordering, fleet maintenance, and safety training, and he was still the default answer whenever a crew hit something complicated in the field. When a crew calls with a problem, is there a name other than the owner's that comes up first? For Weston's crews, there wasn't one yet.
The strain showed up off the job site too. During an industry trip, Weston described watching his production team struggle from a distance he couldn't close: "I was in Vegas last week, and it was miserable. The jobs were fine, but my two production guys were out there while I was a distressed mess back home, when I really didn't need to be." He didn't need to be anxious about it (his team wasn't failing), but there was no structure yet that let him trust that from a distance.
None of this showed up as an obvious crisis, because the top line kept climbing. Net profit margin told a different story. It had slid from 15% (back at $1.75 million in revenue) down to 11% at $2.42 million, or about $266,000 in net profit on the year. Growing revenue while margin quietly erodes is what a technical bottleneck usually looks like from a distance, since nobody sees the owner's calendar filling up with job-site calls that never show up on the P&L.
"The goal is not to be the busiest contractor, the goal is to be a profitable contractor."
— Stuart Trier
Gross Profit per Crew Day measures the cash a crew generates for every day spent on a job site, after subtracting direct labor and materials. Most contractors judge a job by its margin percentage alone, which hides how much that job earned per day on-site.
A $10,000 job with $4,000 in direct costs yields $6,000 in gross profit. A crew that takes 4 days to finish it earns $1,500 a day. Shave that same job down to 2 days (a faster layout, less rework, a crew that isn't waiting on an answer from the owner) and gross profit per day jumps to $3,000, with the exact same total job. That difference covers fixed overhead twice as fast and frees up crew capacity for the next job, without adding a single new hire.
Weston had used this exact metric years earlier, before his business grew past the point where he could track it himself. "When I first started my business, I heavily wrote bids on gross profit per day," he told Stuart. "It was an easy concept for a new contractor to wrap my head around." The company had grown past what he could track personally, even though the metric itself stayed exactly as useful.
Building one new seat, and handing it complete ownership of the thing both men had been sharing badly, solved this without an expensive replacement for Weston or asking the production director to somehow handle both jobs better.
The rollout wasn't instant. Weston floated the idea to his strongest installers first to get early buy-in, then made the promotion official at a Monday morning company meeting. Even after the announcement, one habit didn't change right away: crews kept showing up to the yard 45 minutes before their actual start time out of routine, until the new field lead started setting job-specific start times himself. That one adjustment alone saved roughly $2,500 a month in labor, work the new role picked up almost as an afterthought once it had real ownership of the schedule.
The clearest sign the constraint had moved came fast, within weeks. By early February, job-level tracking on a basement job using the new field lead's tighter site process showed a 61% gross profit in just 2 days of labor, a jump Weston noticed immediately in his own numbers. "That's a big jump," he said, reviewing the data with Stuart. "And I sold it."
The production director noticed the shift too, once he no longer had to split his attention.
"With my production director in the warehouse more, I've done essentially zero production this week. I still get my hands dirty sometimes; I'm just done fielding questions."
— Weston
By March, the company posted $322,000 in produced revenue across 36 completed jobs, its best month on record, at a 65% gross profit margin. Direct labor, which had historically run at 27.1% of revenue, settled at 14%. For the first time in years, production capacity became the constraint holding the pipeline back, instead of sales. One person now owned the execution side full-time, instead of two people sharing it badly.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly production volume | Roughly $194,000/month trailing average | $322,000 record month |
| Owner job-site involvement | Daily calls and site visits for technical questions | Zero hours, full step-back |
| Field execution ownership | Split between the owner and production director | 1 dedicated Field Production Lead |
| Direct labor ratio | 27.1% of revenue | 14% of revenue |
| Gross profit margin | High 50s% | 65% |
None of this went smoothly at the compensation stage. Moving the new field lead off hourly pay meant giving up guaranteed overtime he'd relied on, and a straight salary risked reading as a real pay cut, whatever the paperwork said about total value. Weston also had a separate, quieter worry: the new lead was well liked and talkative, and Weston didn't want him discussing internal gross-profit numbers with the rest of the crew. Clear Results and Weston resolved both at once, building a total compensation package transparent enough to remove the pay-cut fear (base salary, vehicle, health benefit, quarterly bonus, all documented) while drawing a clear, separate line. Field execution authority was his; company financial detail stayed with ownership. Getting that balance wrong in either direction (too little pay certainty, or too much financial transparency handed to a new manager) would have undone the promotion before it had a chance to work.
Any contracting business where the best technician gets promoted before anyone delegates real job-site authority to them runs into the same wall Weston did.
HVAC. An HVAC contractor is the only technician who can troubleshoot a multi-stage or zoned heat pump system. When an install crew hits a wiring mismatch or a refrigerant line issue, the job stalls until the owner drives out to the site himself. Promoting a top installer to a Field Production Lead role, with authority to verify site conditions before install day and resolve technical questions on the spot, keeps the job moving without the owner ever setting foot on it.
Plumbing. Trenchless sewer-lining jobs and complicated boiler tie-ins routinely stall because only the owner can navigate them. Hand a senior journeyman ownership of pre-job camera scoping and homeowner walkthroughs, and the same site surprises get caught before excavation starts instead of mid-job.
Roofing. A roofing company owner personally inspects every complex tear-off and custom flashing detail, so crews stall on unexpected decking rot until the owner arrives to decide how it gets repaired. Promote a veteran foreman to own daily job setups and pre-job roof-deck audits, with standing authority to approve standard repairs, and tear-off and dry-in schedules stop stalling every time something unexpected turns up under the shingles.
Field crews needing the owner's personal presence or approval before finishing a complex job is the clearest sign. When the owner spends hours a week answering site layout questions or solving on-site surprises, production throughput is capped at exactly the owner's personal bandwidth, no more. One useful test is pulling the last 10 technical questions that came to the owner directly and checking how many of them a properly briefed field lead could have answered instead. If it's most of them, the constraint has already been identified.
Look for the person crews already treat as the technical authority on the hardest jobs, regardless of tenure. In Weston's case, the promoted lead was already the one his production director and crews consulted informally on complex drains and difficult layouts, well before the title changed. A structured checklist tool for daily job walks and closeouts matters more here than raw seniority, because the role rewards consistent execution, applying the same standard to every job, every time.
Moving someone off hourly pay with heavy overtime into a flat salary can feel like a pay cut even when total compensation goes up, so the safest structure writes down every piece of value before the base-salary number comes up at all: vehicle or travel benefit, health contribution, and a bonus pool tied to specific outcomes like gross profit dollars and review scores. Presenting the full package first, with base salary as just one line among several, is what kept Weston's new lead from hearing "pay cut" before he'd heard the whole offer.
Draw the line at promotion time, before any leak has a chance to happen. Give the new lead full operational authority over dispatch, job-site quality, and technical decisions, but keep gross-profit and pricing detail with ownership, and say so directly instead of assuming it's understood. Weston raised this concern before it caused any friction, since the new lead was well liked and talkative with the rest of the crew.
In this case, it moved a company from a trailing average near $194,000 a month to a $322,000 record month within roughly one quarter of installing the new role, with direct labor dropping from 27.1% to 14% of revenue over the same stretch. The gain came from removing delay, since crews were no longer waiting on an answer and jobs no longer sat half-laid-out. Nobody new was hired, and no crew worked longer hours to get there.
Where a typical home service coaching program hands an owner a framework and checks back in once a month, Clear Results reviewed the new field lead's numbers with Weston directly every week during the transition, catching the pay-structure concern and the oversharing concern before either one derailed the promotion. That weekly involvement is what turned the new job description into a $322,000 month within one quarter.
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.
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A basement waterproofing contractor built a $2.42 million business on an 11% margin, bracing every winter for cash crunches that felt like proof his company was failing. Switching from cash-basis to accrual accounting exposed the truth: the seasonal losses were only ever a timing illusion.
