Most owners answer this question by buying more leads. That is the most expensive door into the room and it is usually the wrong one. Work is already coming in. The question is which of it is worth having, how much of it closes, and whether the jobs that close leave anything behind once you have paid for them.
What actually decides whether a job is profitable?
Gross profit, not ticket size. A $14,000 job that took three trips, generated a callback and sat unpaid for four months is not your best job, and if you sort your work by revenue you will never find that out. Sort by what was left after direct job costs and the picture changes, sometimes completely.
Four things move that number more than anything else. Travel, because drive time is labor you pay for and cannot bill. Callbacks, because the second trip is free and the third truck you needed that afternoon was busy. Collection, because revenue you have not been paid is not revenue. And scope creep, because the job you priced and the job you did are frequently two different jobs.
None of that is visible from the top line. All of it is visible the moment you look at gross profit by job, which is the whole reason step one exists.
What are the five steps, in order?
Kerry Webb walks owners through these in this sequence, and the sequence matters. Steps four and five do nothing for a company that has not done steps one and two.
How do I find my best jobs from the last 90 days?
Pull the last 90 days and sort it by service type, by customer source and by location. You are looking for the jobs that produced the strongest gross profit without excessive travel, callbacks or collection problems.
Not the biggest tickets. The cleanest ones. Look at the top ten and the bottom ten side by side and ask what is different about them. Usually it is the same two or three things over and over, and once you can name them you know what to go and get more of and what to stop taking.
This takes an afternoon. It is the highest-return afternoon most owners spend all quarter.
How do I build a recurring customer base?
Maintenance agreements are the most reliable source of consistent work in a home-service company. Present maintenance on 100 percent of your calls and sign up 50 percent of the opportunities. That is the standard Kerry holds owners to, and most companies are nowhere near it because nobody ever made it somebody's job.
Then check the price of the agreement itself. Does it cover the visits, the benefits you promised and the labor involved? Plenty of companies sell maintenance at a number that loses money on purpose and hope the pull-through covers it. Sometimes it does. Usually nobody has checked.
Schedule the preventive visits into your slower periods, which is half the point of having them, and track your renewal rate. A maintenance base that does not renew is a marketing list, not a customer base.
Where am I losing work between the inquiry and the payment?
Every home-service company leaks work in the same four places. Calls are not answered promptly. Booking is harder than it needs to be. Open estimates are never followed up. The customer is not kept informed, so they call somebody else while they wait.
Assign each step to a person, not to the team. A step that belongs to everybody belongs to nobody, and that is precisely where the work falls out. Put a name beside "who calls back an open estimate on day three" and watch what happens to your close rate.
If the leak is at the front desk, that is a specific, fixable thing, and the CSR Master Playbook is built for that one problem.
How should I measure my marketing?
By profitable completed jobs. Not calls, not form fills, not impressions.
Track advertising cost alongside completed revenue and gross profit, by source. A source that delivers a pile of cheap calls that rarely book, and books thin work when it does, is worse than a source that delivers a handful that nearly always book well, whatever the cost per lead says. Cheap leads are only cheap after they turn into paid work.
How do I price from my own costs and capacity?
Your price has four parts: labor burden, materials, overhead and a profit allowance. All four. Most pricing problems are one of those four being guessed at, and it is almost always overhead or burden.
There is no number anyone can give you, and you should be suspicious of anyone who offers one. What your work should cost depends on your own labor burden, your own overhead, your local market and how much billable capacity you actually have in a week. Work it out from your own books: take your true annual overhead, divide it across the billable hours you can genuinely sell, add your fully burdened labor cost and your materials, and then add the profit you intend to make rather than the profit you hope is left over. The Small Business Administration's guidance on managing your finances covers the bookkeeping side of that if your numbers are not clean enough to do it yet.
Then keep your service area tight enough that driving does not eat the day. Chasing a job two hours out at the same price as one twenty minutes away is a discount you did not know you were giving.
What goes wrong when owners try to fix this?
Four patterns, and you will recognize at least one.
The owner buys more leads. Revenue rises, profit does not, and now the same broken conversion process is being fed more expensively.
The owner fixes everything at once. Five initiatives, no owner named on any of them, and by week six the company is back to how it was in March.
The owner measures the wrong end. Booked calls go up, nobody looks at gross profit by department, and the growth turns out to be in the work that loses money.
The owner sells maintenance agreements hard and never checks renewal. Year one looks excellent. Year three is a list of people who used to be customers.
What should I ask before I pay anyone to help?
Five questions. If a coach, a marketing company or a consultant cannot answer them plainly, keep your money.
Which number will change, and by when will I be able to see it? Are you measuring booked calls or completed profitable jobs? What does your process do about my open estimates specifically? Who inside my company owns each step when you are gone? And what do you need from my books before you can tell me anything useful?
Trade bodies are a reasonable second opinion on the technical side of all this. The Air Conditioning Contractors of America and the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association both publish standards and member resources that have nothing to sell you.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know which of my jobs are actually profitable?
Sort the last 90 days by gross profit per job rather than by revenue, then look at travel, callbacks and how long each one took to collect. The cleanest jobs are rarely the biggest ones. Most owners find the pattern inside a single afternoon of looking.
Should I raise my prices or get more leads first?
Neither, until you know your gross profit by job and your close rate. Buying leads for a process that loses half of them is expensive, and raising prices on work you have not costed properly just moves the guess. Find the leak first, then decide which lever to pull.
What is a maintenance agreement supposed to do for my business?
Three things. It gives you predictable work in your slow periods, it keeps a customer attached to you instead of to whoever answers first next time, and it produces replacement opportunities from equipment your technicians already know. It is the most reliable source of consistent work in a home-service company.
How many of my calls should I be offering maintenance on?
All of them. Present maintenance on 100 percent of calls and sign up 50 percent of the opportunities. That is the standard Kerry Webb holds owners to.
Why do my open estimates go cold?
Because nobody owns them. An estimate sits in a pile, the customer hears nothing, and they call the next company on their list while they are waiting. Put one person's name against following up open estimates, give them a schedule, and the same estimates start closing.
Want Help Doing It?
Once the work is coming in cleanly, watch the numbers that tell you whether it is working, and read the rest of the resources for home-service owners when you have the time.
The 90-Day Plan is the engagement that runs this check and five others across the whole business. Systems and tools for growth is the piece that installs the booking and pricing discipline, and coaching for results is the piece that works on you and your leadership team. Short answers to the common questions are on the questions home-service owners ask most.
Book the $100K Conversation and bring your last 90 days. Live every Thursday, 11 AM to noon Central.
Take the Business Assessment if you would rather find the leak on your own first.
Call BGS Strategies on 940-441-3231, email support@bgsstrategies.com, or send BGS Strategies a message. BGS Strategies works with home-service owners across the United States and Canada, and calls before 10 AM usually reach voicemail because Kerry is coaching.
