When I attend contractor based conferences I will sit in on various training sessions with strategies on how to take your business from $500,000 to $3,000,000 in sales for example.
Sometimes at the lunch table I listen in on discussions on the same topic. Where are you marketing, do you have employees or subcontractors, how are you growing your sales?
Don’t get me wrong, celebrate sales but not only sales! Sales are critical for business success and cash flow. But profit and cash flow are not the same. Yes you need them both but for different reasons. Sales is the amount you collect from your customer. Profit is the amount your company keeps after expenses are paid on a project. Cash flow is the money coming in and the money going out each month.
Now, if you are doing cost based estimating this should be all set, right?
It is very simple to see the sales that have been generated by project totals or invoice totals and maybe your software even has a nice graph of monthly sales on the main dashboard. But here are a couple of questions:
Now if I see that sales graph in my software and in April I sold and completed $500,000 worth of jobs. I am sitting back with my hands clasped behind my head with my feet up on the desk feeling proud.
Perhaps what is missing from this proud moment is the fact that the $500,000 in jobs in April were completed at a cost of over $495,000 to the company. It included a cost of 40 man hours lost in that month due to miscommunication about project status. On May 1st you look back and your gross profit for the month of April was less than $5000.
Maybe there were some lost days of productivity due to your crew going to the wrong location or because a $5 part to complete the bathroom renovation needed to be shipped overnight to the site at a cost of over $100 to you. This lost part for the bathroom then put your finishing crew on the project behind by a day. Your estimate included $5 for material but not the cost of the overnight shipping. So your overall costs are absorbing that additional shipping.
Less than $5000 in gross profit in a month may not leave much room for the capital improvements that were planned or the equipment that keeps breaking down and needs replacing.
The main focus is too often just on how much is sold and not the profitability of what was sold.
Tracking worked hours on a daily basis and regularly entering expenses will help with your piece of mind that projects are going to be profitable.
Software tools like Estimate Rocket can help you track your profit margin for a project. Estimate Rocket can also track your employee hours, material expenses and sub expenses in real time to let you look at real job progress. Being able to manage and schedule your team is also a key to this success.