How do you stay profitable when your schedule is fully booked?
Early on, I thought the goal was simple: fill the schedule.
More customers = more money.
But I hit a point where my days were completely packed—15+ stops, driving all over my service area—and I still felt like I wasn’t getting ahead. Long days, constant movement, but nothing to show for it at the end of the month.
So I finally broke it down.
I looked at:
- Time per yard (from the moment I parked to when I left for the next house, not just scooping)
- Average yards per hour
- $ per minute - (if I was in someone's yard for 10 minutes and I charged them $20, I made $2 a minute)
- Labor cost per hour (real cost, not just hourly wage. I had to treat myself as an employee if I was ever going to hire someone)
What I realized was brutal:
Some of my “full” days were actually my least profitable days.
Too much windshield time.
Underpriced customers locked into old rates.
Routes that made no sense geographically.
Fixing that didn’t come from adding more leads.
It came from:
- Raising prices on the right customers
- Letting go of the wrong ones
- Tightening routes so stops actually made sense together
That shift did more for profit than any marketing I had done up to that point.
Question:
If you had to guess right now... what’s hurting your profitability more:
- Pricing
- Route inefficiency
- Labor cost
- Something else
And what makes you say that?
