Your crew does extra work on-site because the customer asks nicely, or because the scope was unclear to begin with. Nobody logs it. Nobody bills it. The customer gets free work and your margin evaporates.
Over a month, unbilled change orders can add up to thousands in free labor and materials. It's the most common profit leak in home services because it's invisible unless you're tracking it.
The fix is cultural, not complicated. Require written approval and billing for every scope change, no exceptions. Train your field teams that 'being nice' doesn't mean working for free.
When your team understands that every unbilled hour comes directly out of the company's profit, and ultimately out of their bonuses and job security, the behavior changes fast.
Jobs consistently take longer than estimated, but estimates never get updated. Your estimator quotes 8 hours, crews take 12. Fix: track actual vs. estimated hours on every job and recalibrate estimates quarterly.
Over-ordering materials, not tracking returns, and letting leftover materials sit in a truck bed. Fix: implement a material reconciliation process on every job. Track what was ordered vs. what was used.
Crews driving 45 minutes between jobs because scheduling isn't optimized for geography. Fix: route-optimize your daily schedule and cluster jobs by zone.
Rework and warranty visits that eat crew time without generating revenue. Fix: track callback rates by crew and by job type. Identify patterns and address root causes through training.
You're winning jobs and staying busy, yet your margins are shrinking. This playbook walks you through job-level costing so you know exactly where profit leaks out.
Most contractors price based on gut feel or competitors. This framework shows you how to price based on your actual costs, overhead, and target margin.
Use our free Valuation Calculator to estimate your company's worth in under 2 minutes — based on your actual revenue, EBITDA, and industry multiples. See where your value is leaking, and what it could be worth with the Clear Results operating system.
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