The $100,000 Blind Spot Why Your P&L Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

Job-level financial insights help you spot successes, fix issues, and lead your team more effectively.

A Simple Challenge for 2026: Get Your Financials in Shape

Happy New Year in advance. Merry Christmas in advance. This time of year always gets me thinking about goals, plans, and what we want the next twelve months to look like.

I have a question for you. Do you have a plan for 2026? And by plan, I mean a specific set of written goals. If you don’t, do not stop reading. Do not tune out. It is okay! Some of my clients are already ready to go. Some are not. Either way, it is not too late.

I want to give you a thought today. If there is only one thing you dedicate yourself to fixing or figuring out this year, just one, you can probably guess what I am going to talk about. It is related to your financials. Understanding your financials and being able to use them as a tool is one of the most important areas of coaching I provide to my restoration clients.

If you have been watching my videos, you know I am passionate about helping owners get more profitable, reduce the chaos in their business, and build a sellable business. And I would argue that one of the most important parts of that is having good, clean, explainable P&Ls and balance-sheet level financials.

This doesn’t happen by accident . . . But it is also not rocket science. It is not that tough. I figured it out, and you absolutely can too.

In my first couple of years in business, my financials were a disaster. Not necessarily from a profitability standpoint, but in terms of clarity. They were unexplainable and unusable. They didn’t help me figure out what was going well or what wasn’t. They didn’t tell me anything useful.

All of us have a bad month or an off month from time to time. The difference between having usable financials and unusable financials is huge. Good financials become a tool. With usable financials, you can figure out what went wrong. You can do some detective work. You can put together an action plan aimed specifically at the problem area you want to improve.

At the same time, you can look at what went really well. Maybe you had a great gross profit in a specific division. Ask yourself, how did we achieve that? What did we do well? You don’t always have to focus on the negative.

For me, the turning point came when I wanted peace of mind. I wanted to know what was happening in my business, good or bad. It started with getting my chart of accounts in order. It included setting up a bookkeeping discipline so we were consistent with how we invoiced, how we booked deposits, and how we recorded transactions. By the fifth or seventh of the month, we could look at good, usable P&Ls, not just for the company but at the job level. Job costing and being able to run job filtered profitability reports in a you restoration business is incredibly important and a great tool to provide coaching to your team members.

It all starts with a few simple steps.

If you already know what to do because you have a great bookkeeper or a great CPA, but you haven’t created the urgency to take action, I want to challenge you. Get started today. What action can you today today?

If, on the other hand, you need some help getting started, book a call with me. Even if you are not interested in coaching right now, or maybe not ever, book a call anyway. I am happy to get on a short call with you, give you a few action items, and help you take the first steps to make this a reality in your business.

Thanks for reading, and happy New Year.