This is one of the most common traps in service businesses and it usually starts at the quote stage, not the job stage. By the time you're breaking down a completed job and finding the margin problem, the damage is already done.
The shift that tends to make the biggest difference is building your actual cost burden into the quoting formula before the job is ever sold. Not as a gut check after the fact, but as a hard floor the quote has to clear. Payroll burden, overhead allocation, transaction fees, all of it priced in by default.
The other piece is job mix. Once you have per-job margin visibility you start seeing which categories are consistently thin and which ones carry the business. A lot of operators find that 20% of their job types are generating most of the real profit and the rest is just keeping the trucks moving.
What did your pricing adjustment look like practically? Did you raise across the board or start being selective about job types?
