Four owners on what the picture looked like before, what they saw once it cleared, and the decision that came next.
Three years of growth on the top line, two years of cash getting tighter — and no one could say exactly why.
Labor variance on insurance jobs was running 18% above bid, and a single re-roof crew was absorbing the rest of the company's margin.
Gross margin recovered from 26.4% to 32.1% in two quarters, without changing the price list.
Sales kept landing larger accounts; operations kept missing the timeline. Nobody owned the handoff data.
Estimate-to-actual hours on projects over $200k were drifting 22% — but only on jobs sold by the two newest reps.
Repricing the project tier and retraining two reps lifted project-side margin 5.8 points in nine months.
Marketing spend had crept past $90k a month. No one could agree on which channels were actually working.
Two paid channels were generating 42% of leads and 6% of booked revenue. The owner had been defending them in every team meeting.
Cut $38k/month of paid spend. Booked revenue rose the following month — and the next two.
End-of-year would surprise with a margin miss every December. The CFO had stopped trusting the forecast.
Five long-running jobs were absorbing change orders that never reached billing. The leakage was traceable to a single workflow.
Closed $2.1M of unbilled change orders. The forecast and the books agreed for the first time in four years.