The two numbers you know, and the ones you do not
Most owners of a $2M to $20M contracting business know two numbers cold. What hit the bank this month, and what the biggest jobs billed. That is not carelessness. It is what the systems give you.
Nearly every number that decides what the business is worth sits below that line. Gross margin by service line. Margin by technician and by crew. What a callback really costs once you load the second truck roll, the warranty part, and the hour the office spends rebooking it. Whether the maintenance base is growing or quietly bleeding out one non-renewal at a time. Whether the install crew that looks busiest is the one losing money on rework.
The reason you do not have these is mechanical, not personal. Revenue, labor hours, and parts live in your field service platform. True cost lives in your accounting file. Nobody has joined them. So pricing gets set by what the last competitor charged and what feels fair, and the business runs on a top-line number and a bank balance.
Joining those two systems used to be a job for a team of analysts over several weeks, which is why it only ever happened during a sale, paid for by a buyer, and shown to you only after you had already signed something. That is no longer true. It is now a job for one person and a pipeline, and that is the entire reason we can sell you the answer instead of keeping it.
What you get
Four cuts of your own business, most of which owners tell us they have never seen.
Margin by service line
Replacement, service and repair, maintenance agreements, indoor air quality, and whatever else you sell — each with true gross margin after loaded labor, materials, permits, equipment, and callback rework. This is the cut that most often reverses what an owner believed about his own business.
Margin by technician and crew
Revenue per billed hour, billable efficiency against paid hours, average ticket, and callback rate per technician. It answers a question that is otherwise pure instinct: which of your people are actually carrying the business, and which busy one is expensive.
Recurring revenue quality
Active agreement count, renewal rate, revenue per agreement, and the conversion rate from one-time repair into an agreement. A book priced years ago below today's labor cost looks like recurring revenue and behaves like a liability. You should know which one you have.
Demand and conversion
Booked-job rate on inbound calls, revenue per truck per day, and the marketing source behind every booked job with its realized margin. Most owners spend against revenue. This lets you spend against margin.
How it runs
The conversation is the part that matters
The report is the artifact. The two hours is the product.
We start with what the data says you do well, because there is almost always a line earning more than you thought. Then the reordering, flat and without drama — which lines earn, which are being subsidized, and by how much. Then what you could do about it, in the order that pays.
Then the part most people selling you something skip: what the model cannot tell you. Where the data was thin, where an allocation was a judgment call, and what a different reasonable assumption would have done to the answer. If you have been sold to before, you are waiting for the catch. We would rather hand you the model's limits than have you find them later.
Who this is not for
We turn engagements away, and it is cheaper for both of us to find out now.
If your jobs live in a paper folder and a whiteboard, or your technicians do not book hours against jobs, there is nothing to join and the model would produce a confident answer that happens to be wrong. If your accounting file cannot separate technician wages from owner compensation, the cost side will not hold.
And if what you want is a number that confirms what you already believe, this will probably annoy you. The rebuild frequently reorders which parts of the business are the asset. That is the point of it, and it is worth knowing you are ready for that before you pay for it.
We also buy businesses like yours. Here is how we handle that.
You should assume any buyer offering you free analysis is doing diligence on you. That is the normal shape of this, and it is a reasonable thing to be suspicious of. So we have written our side down as rules rather than assurances.
You raise a sale, or nobody does
We will not initiate an acquisition approach during the engagement, or for a defined period after we deliver. Not in the findings conversation, not in a follow-up, not as a soft aside. If a sale ever gets discussed, it is because you brought it up.
The fee is never credited against a purchase price
If we ever bought your business, the fee you paid for this would not come off the price. Crediting it would give us a reason to want the sale and give you a reason to prefer us over a better offer. We would rather the two things stayed unconnected, so they are.
You keep the model, in a form you can check
Not a PDF. The working model and the assumptions, in a format your CPA can open and interrogate — or hand to a different buyer entirely. If we ever came in low against our own analysis, you would have the evidence to see it.
If we ever bid, we reconcile to what we already told you
Any offer we made would be underwritten off the same model you already have. Where our view differed from what this report said, we would write down the difference and hand it to you alongside the offer. You would not have to take our word that we did not shade the diagnostic.
There is one more thing worth saying plainly, because it is the real reason these hold. We find businesses through relationships — brokers, accountants, suppliers, people who talk to each other. In that market, reputation is not a soft asset. It is the only asset. An owner who concluded this was diligence in disguise would tell his accountant, and that would close the channel that generates everything we do. Behaving well here is not just right. It is the only thing that makes economic sense.
For accountants, brokers, and suppliers
If you advise contractors, you already know which of your clients are flying blind. You also know it is not your job to fix it — job costing at this depth is not what a tax practice or a brokerage does — and that sending a client to a buyer is a conversation you probably do not want to have.
This is a different referral. It is a paid engagement with no sale attached, your client keeps the output, and the standstill above applies from the moment we start. It makes you look useful without costing you the account, and it works for the client who is not going anywhere as much as the one who is.
We will also share back what we are learning in aggregate. As the work builds, we can give referring partners a read on margin structure by trade and region that is not available from a trade association survey or a software vendor, because it is built on real cost joined to real job data. That is not a whitepaper. It is a conversation, and it is one of the few things we will have that you cannot get elsewhere.
Start a conversation
One call is usually enough to tell whether this is worth doing. We will ask what system you run and look at a sample export. If it is not a fit, we will say so on that call rather than after you have paid us.
Ask about a Weigh-In
Referring a client
If you advise contractors and want to understand the engagement before you put a client's name to it, say so below and we will walk you through it first. We would rather you were comfortable than fast.