Calculate your true hourly costs
Hi all, just wanted to mention that we realized in our first year scraping by that we weren't covering our costs of doing business. Even though we run our business out of our home, we jave insurance and licensing, vehicle expenses etc. That are part of our overhead. Finally we took all those expenses and added them up, divided by the normal number of business hours per month and made sure to build that into our hourly charge. Now we are able to set aside the money we need to come up with every 6 mo ths or annually and don't have to woory about spreading ourselves too thin when the expenses arrive. What are some shifts you made to build a sustainable business?What's Standard Gross Profit for Your Industry?
I once listened to Tom Reber preach about 50% gross profit and how if you aren't aiming for that, you are going to hurt yourself short/ longer term. He was basically saying, for every dollar you make, you need to make two. This has been super impactful for me and my business but I'm noticing on my really big projects, it's so hard to keep that. I have one $120k exterior BBQ that has definitely had some inefficiencies but we are probably looking at 35% end of day. But that's 35% of a large $$ so that is kind of ok. For those of you who do a good job tracking this (btw Jobber's gross profit calculator is objectively amazing for this btw)- what is your gross profit and what do you usually shoot for?
Invoice update via API
Jobber does not allow invoices to be updated and closed/marked as paid from externally. We use Xero as our main accounting system as it hooks into or bank. Every time we mark an invoice as paid in Xero, we need to manually close the corresponding invoice in Jobber. I have raised this multiple times with Jobber but it is not on their roadmap. Hoping there are more people out there with the same requirement to help boost this post so that Jobber can do something about it. Unless someone has found another way to do it. This will save at 30+ hours a month of man hour to change every invoice.What services can I offer during winter to keep income coming in?
I am currently working a full-time job while running my company. How do I earn income in the “winter” months in Kentucky? We may have one snow a year, grass doesn’t grow, to cold to pressure wash. Everyone kinda goes hermit, thanks in advanceAnyone else realize they were breaking even or losing money after expenses?
I had a phase where we looked “busy” on paper, fully booked, money coming in, but when I actually broke down the numbers, some jobs were barely breaking even. Once I factored in true payroll burden (taxes, workers comp), supplies, insurance, and transaction fees, it was a wake-up call. There were jobs we were doing that felt productive day-to-day but weren’t contributing to profit at all. For us, it came down to tightening up pricing, being more intentional about which jobs we accepted, and really understanding our numbers on a per-job basis (not just overall revenue). Curious if anyone else has gone through this and what changes made the biggest impact for you?What would your business look like if 70% of clients were on auto-pay with no cards expiring?
A year ago I looked at my numbers and realized something frustrating: I was spending hours every week chasing payments and updating expired cards. Between follow-ups, declined payments, and cards expiring every few months, it felt like billing was taking almost as much energy as running the actual jobs. So we made one change in our process: we started moving clients to auto-pay as the default. At first it was slow. A few clients said yes, a few ignored it, and a few needed reminders. But over time it snowballed. Now about 70% of our clients are on auto-pay. The difference in the business is huge. Invoices get paid automatically. Cash flow is predictable. My admin time dropped dramatically because we’re not chasing payments or dealing with expired cards all the time. It also makes scheduling easier because we know jobs turn into actual revenue without the follow-up. What surprised me most is clients actually prefer it. They like not having to remember to pay or deal with invoices every visit. If I could go back, I would have pushed auto-pay much earlier. It turns billing from a weekly stress into something that basically runs in the background.When is it time to hire an accountant?
I am wondering at what point some of you guys have hired an accountant? Did you hire one to grow? To maintain what you have? Or are you simply using one to file taxes at the end of the year? I am thinking about hiring an accountant to manage my finances for me and see where things go, but wondering when is the right time.
