Busy every day and still not sure where the money went?
HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, solar and every trade in between. The phones ring, the trucks roll, and the bank balance still keeps you up at night. Here's why, and what fixes it.
Eight problems we hear from contractors over and over.
Busy season pays for slow season, or doesn't.
Summer and winter rushes bring the cash in; shoulder seasons drain it. Without a forecast, you find out you're short when payroll is due.
Jobs priced on gut feel.
If you don't know your true cost per hour with the truck, insurance, callbacks and drive time included, some jobs lose money and you'd never know it.
No real paycheck for the person who owns it.
Draws pulled when there's money in the account make it impossible to plan your household, and they often cost you more in tax than a proper owner payroll would.
The April surprise.
No quarterly estimates set aside, equipment bought at the wrong time, the wrong business structure for your profit. The bill shows up all at once.
Business and personal money mixed together.
One card for everything means books nobody trusts, deductions you can't prove and a return that doesn't reflect what the business really earned.
Paying for calls that never get booked.
Missed calls, leads that never make it into the system, no follow-up. Money spent on ads leaks out between the phone ringing and the job getting scheduled.
Techs, helpers and the 1099 question.
Getting worker classification, payroll taxes and job costing for labor right is easy to put off, and expensive to get wrong.
Adding trucks without knowing if you can afford them.
Another truck, another tech, a new service line. Without real numbers every growth decision is a bet.
A roofer, four years behind.
A roofing company doing about $350K a year hadn't filed in four years and owed the IRS more than $100,000. The work was there. What wasn't there was the system: the books weren't kept up, the owner had no structure for paying himself, and business and personal money were mixed together.
We rebuilt the books, filed correct returns for the missing years, changed the company to an S corp and set up a proper owner payroll. Once the returns showed the real numbers, $60,000 of that balance went away.
It was never really a tax problem. It was a books problem.
Before you spend more on ads, stop losing the leads you already paid for.
At a nationwide firm where Tom ran sales, leads were going straight to salespeople, and many never made it into the CRM. We set up a front desk to answer every call, vet it, log it and hand qualified callers to closers. On the same ad spend, 18% more leads made it into the system and the close rate went from 14% to 16%.
Contractors have the same leak: the call that goes to voicemail at 4:45, the estimate nobody followed up on. The fix is a system, not a bigger ad budget.
Numbers you trust, a plan for taxes and someone checking every month.
- Clean monthly books. Reconciled, with business and personal money separated, so you know what you really made.
- Job and service-line profitability. Which work makes money, and which just keeps the crew busy.
- A 13-week cash forecast. So slow season and big purchases don't sneak up on you.
- A real owner paycheck. Set up through payroll, with the right business structure behind it.
- A tax plan during the year. Quarterly set-asides and equipment timing, not surprises in April.
- Lead and sales systems. So calls get answered, logged and followed up.
Learn more about our fractional CFO, tax strategy and business consulting services. Already behind with the IRS? Start with Tax Help.
Find out what your numbers are really telling you.
One short call. Tell us what keeps you up at night, and we'll tell you honestly where we'd start.