Single-Digit Profit to Mid-Teens in a Year: A Restoration Client Story

Chart of accounts. Targets. Job costing. A job-filtered P&L review with LB/NT after every finish. That's the sequence.

If you've got jobs that make money and jobs that don't, and you can't actually tell me which is which, this is worth five minutes of your time. I've been coaching restoration owners on their financials since 2009, and when a client finally starts job costing, actually tracking what a job made against what it was supposed to make, they almost can't help but get more profitable.

I have a client who joined the Restoration Profit Academy, and like everybody does, shared his financials with me as part of onboarding. I went through them and found the same thing I usually find. His chart of accounts wasn't built in a way that let him actually see what was going on in his business. The only thing he could see when he looked at his P&L was net profit. That was it. That was the only number he knew was real, and it was low. It was in the single digits.

Before he knew what his labor target was, gross profit target by job type, and was sharing that with his team, he was really flying blind. They were just starting jobs, doing the best they could, and hoping they were profitable. That was it. He had no real idea which jobs were helping profitability and which ones were dragging it down.

A year later, his net profit is in the high teens, and there's more room, but that's a real jump in twelve months.

How did it happen? First couple weeks, we fixed his chart of accounts. Once that was in shape, he could finally see what was happening in the business. Then he started job costing. Set gross profit targets with his team, and after every job wrapped, pulled a P&L just for that job and had a quick debrief session. What do we like best about how the job ran, and what are we going to do differently next time?

Along the way I gave him monthly feedback on his cash and accrual P&Ls, recorded as screencasts he could watch on his own time. But the goal was never for him to need me forever. It was to get him to where he could sit down, review his own numbers, record his own screencast walking through what he saw, and bring me that assessment instead of the other way around.

That's where he is now. He opens his own P&L every month and can tell you which jobs hit the GP target and which ones didn't. He's not waiting for me to catch the problem anymore. Most months he catches it himself before I even see the numbers.

The tool that ties it together is a simple financial metrics scorecard. I built it for myself years ago, and every client of mine uses some version of it now. One page, once a month. Your revenue. Your GP by division. Your days of sales outstanding. Three numbers, and you know exactly where you stand.

If you don't know which of your jobs are profitable and which ones are draining margin, that's a big problem that you need to fix. That's usually the difference between single-digit and double-digit net profit, and it's completely fixable.

Getting your chart of accounts and your job costing in order, that's exactly what we work on inside the Restoration Profit Academy. If this sounds like where you're at, email me at [email protected] and I'll send you a free resource on this, or book a free strategy call at thegrowthleague.com/schedule and we'll dig into your numbers specifically. Whether that's the Restoration Sales Academy, the Restoration Profit Academy, or one-on-one coaching, we'll figure out what fits you. No pressure. I just want to help you. I want to see you take action.

P.S. one thing neither of us expected out of this. His collections got better too, just from finally paying attention to his own numbers. That's a story for another time.