There’s a stretch every season where the schedule is packed solid. Trucks roll out at first light and come back after dark. Every crew is booked two weeks deep.
By every measure that feels like success. Then you look at the bank account, and it doesn’t add up. You were busier than you’ve ever been, and somehow there’s less to show for it than the slower month before.
If that’s happened to you — and it’s happened to almost everyone who runs crews — you may simply be measuring the wrong number.
Margin doesn’t tell you everything
Most owners judge a job one of two ways: what it billed, or what the margin came out to. Revenue obviously doesn’t tell the whole story. A big invoice can still be a lousy job. So you look at margin instead. But there’s something margin doesn’t tell you:
How long did your crew have to work to earn it?
Consider two jobs.
After materials and other direct job costs, each puts $1,000 into the business. The first ties up a two-person crew for a full eight-hour day. The second is finished in four hours.
Same $1,000. Very different job.
The first consumed 16 crew-hours. The second consumed eight.
One produced $62.50 for every crew-hour you spent. The other produced $125.
Your invoice won’t show you that difference. Your schedule will.
Your hours are the scarce part
Your scarcest resource isn’t another truck or another piece of equipment. It’s your crew’s time in the field. You only get so many crew-hours in a season. You can’t manufacture more overnight, and every hour spent on one job is an hour that can’t be spent somewhere else. That’s why there’s another number worth knowing:
What does each crew-hour earn?
You don’t need complicated software to find out. Take the different kinds of work you already do — installs, maintenance, cleanups, mulch, planting, whatever your lines are. For each one, take a typical job.
Start with what the customer paid. Subtract the materials and other direct job costs that disappear when the job disappears. Then divide what’s left by the total crew-hours the job consumed — number of people times hours, including the time required to get the crew, truck and equipment there and back.
Do that across your different types of work. You may get an uncomfortable surprise.
A service you’ve always thought of as your bread and butter — good invoices, steady work — may be consuming far more of your available hours than you realized. And some humble-looking job you never gave much thought to may quietly be one of the best uses of your crew’s time.
That’s useful information. Because once you see your work this way, some decisions get surprisingly easy. You don’t necessarily need more work.
You need more of the right work.
Most owners don’t need their crews to work more hours. They’re already working plenty. They need the hours they have pointed at work that pays better. So stop asking only:
“How much did this job make?”
Ask:
“How much did it make for every hour it took?”
Your crews only get so many hours in a season.
Measure what’s scarce.