Mike (00:00):
Your ability to price and to sell is the highest leverage point that you have to maximizing your gross profit. Because if you can sell your jobs for 50% more, you don’t even have to worry about your cost of labor and cost of material because you’re going to be making a hundred percent more profit.

Adam (00:15):
Welcome to Jobber Masters of Home Service, a podcast for home service pros, by home service pros. We’re in Las Vegas, and today we’re talking about the number one metric that drives profitability in your business. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester. Today’s guests are Mike Gore Hickman and Megan Schumann. Welcome to the studio, guys.

Megan (00:36):
Thanks.

Adam (00:37):
Yeah, Megan, why don’t you introduce yourself, tell our audience who you are, and what you do?

Megan (00:40):
My name is Megan Schumann, and I am the owner of Top Tier Plumbing. We’re in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. We do plumbing, drain cleaning, well systems, and septic systems, and we’ve been doing it for about 15 years so I started as a CPA, and so that’s the side that I bring into the business.

Adam (00:57):
Sweet. Well, glad you’re here.

Megan (00:58):
Thank you.

Mike (00:58):
My name’s Michael Hickman. I’m the founder of paintergrowth.com and host of the Painter Growth Podcast. We do business coaching and training for painting contractors of all sizes.

Adam (01:07):
Megan, what is the number one metric that drives profitability in business?

Megan (01:11):
So the metric that I like to watch, and it’s really just keeping it easy, is gross profit. Gross profit is what you’re going to find. You take your revenue, you take out your cost of goods sold, and for me, I like to separate cost of materials sold and cost of labor sold, and then that ends up being your gross profit, and by watching that, you’re going to be able to see if you’re profitable or not. There’s lots of other things that go into profitability with overheads, and at the end of the day, but if you can get profit after that cost of material sold and cost of labor sold, you’ve got profit to work with.

Adam (01:45):
So gross profit is revenue minus labor and materials.

Megan (01:48):
Yep.

Adam (01:49):
Mike, you agree?

Mike (01:50):
I agree. Take your total amount that you sold, the total money that you’re collecting you minus how much your materials cost, so how much your paint costs, and how much your labor costs. So, in painting specifically, paint should be around 10 to 15%. Labor should be between 30 and 40%. The goal is a 50% gross profit in the painting industry. If you are on the tools and you are an active technician in your business or a painter, you need to consider your rate at fair market value. If you don’t consider your rate and you’re trying to get this 50% gross profit, once you replace yourself and hire a painter, well, now your gross profit’s going to be like 20 or 30%, which is not a sustainable or scalable model.

Adam (02:29):
A lot of our listeners right now just got punched in the nose really because they’re assuming they know their number and they’re like 35, 40% gross profit. They’re thinking like, oh my gosh, 50% is so high and I a hundred percent agree with you about 50%. So what do our listeners need to do if their gross profit, they wake up this morning, they’re like, I’m not making very much money.

Megan (02:50):
Different industries, too, are going to have different values. So I mean that’s for painting. One thing that you can do is you can ask your CPA, they’re going to have metrics. They’re going to know what you should be for certain industries. They can give you those amounts. But yeah, if you’re not hitting that, I like to start with breaking down. Let’s look at our cost of goods, so our materials, and let’s look at our cost of labor. And so I split those out separately, and that can help drill down what’s the problem over time. So, if my materials are too high, if my cost of materials sold are 60% okay, am I not buying correctly? Am I not adding price increases that I should have had on these materials? Did I buy for a huge projec, and I didn’t return things that I should have returned that can all affect that material side.

Adam (03:39):
Yeah, totally. Waste is a huge one for materials. You order just too much. Everybody’s like, just add 15%. That’s $80 times 2000 jobs is a lot of money.

Mike (03:48):
So I had a painter I was checking on site, and she’s like, oh, I need another gallon of whatever paint we’re using. And I’m like, okay, well, what do you have left? She’s like, all I got to do is finish this one column. I’m like, okay, well, you need a whole gallon for that. She’s like, no, but it’d be just got to get a little more paint to get it done. And I go look around and she’s got three cans that were just finished, and I go look, and there’s like, there’s paint on the bottom of them. There’s a little bit in each one. So I had her brush ’em all out together and boom, what do you know? She had enough paint to finish it, and she saved $40 not having to buy another gallon, but it’s things like that and having the right incentivization structure to get your team to actually care about materials. Otherwise, why would they care? Not their money.

Adam (04:29):
In my world, if we’re hanging gutters and you’re supposed to put a hanger every 18 to 24 inches and your people are putting ’em every 12 inches and a hanger’s a dollar a piece and there’s 300 hangers on a house, that’s a lot of money. And so our listeners need to realize that don’t just brush off materials costs. Oh, that’s just part of doing business, materials costs. No, no, no. I guarantee you that you’re losing money in your materials costs. You just need to find those waste and then eliminate them.

Megan (04:56):
Yeah, I think to go into the plumbing industry, one of the things you’ll do if you’re not bidding a project correctly is if you need four-inch copper for a job and you can only buy that in a 10-foot stick, well, your job only needs two feet. What are you going to do with the rest of that eight feet that have to go to the job?

Adam (05:17):
You charge a client for that 10 feet.

Megan (05:18):
Correct. There’s some scenarios where you might not, but overall, typically you’re going to want to include that. Otherwise you’ve got way higher cost of good sold than what you actually were able to bill for.

Mike (05:28):
Can we back up for a second? I think that we’re assuming that a lot of contractors are tracking are actually costing their jobs. When I bet over, I don’t know, I would probably say 70% of contractors do not actively cost every single job and to get started is pretty easily, I mean, depending on your industry, just go and Google and see where your percentages should be for materials and labor and then start tracking it job by job on a spreadsheet, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. I can give you a template if you need line by line, one job. What was the cost of the job? How much, what was the percent? What was the material? What was the percent? How much was the leftover? What was the percent? Pretty simple, straightforward spreadsheet, but just start doing that at least to get started

Megan (06:05):
And that’ll be eye-opening. I think for a lot of people, especially on certain projects, certain customers, you’re going to see, oh, you thought you were making this much money on this is really profitable customer, maybe not.

Adam (06:18):
And stop relying on hunches. As human beings, we’re very bad guessers, and we are like, oh yeah, that job is pretty good. That’s not a good way of running your business. And so I fell into this category early on was like, well, the materials were about a hundred dollars, and if once you actually break it down, you realize it was actually $200. Oh, gosh, I didn’t realize. And so if a listener has never done that before, just job cost a job, they’ll be blown away at what they discover.

(06:45):
And things they’ve been assuming, things they’ve been forgetting, things they didn’t even realize. It’s really important to start job costing because that’s how you start take the next step in building your business, so it’s actually more profitable.

Megan (06:57):
100%. I had a time where when I came into the business, my husband’s the master plumber, he was doing work for this contractor. We were traveling quite a ways to do it. I said, you’re not making money on this job. He didn’t believe me, put it in the spreadsheet, showed him we would’ve made more money just staying home, not doing the work.

(07:15):
Then we were going and doing this project. And so once I put it in black and white, we were able to decide are we either going to increase our billings with this customer or is it time to fire that customer and move on. Maybe it’s just not profitable.

Mike (07:28):
Numbers do not care about your feelings.

Adam (07:30):
Let’s say you bid a job at $10,000 and the hot water heater, which is a very big expense for you guys, is a big chunk of that, but you might install that one day, and so the $7,000 that you made is great money, but your cost of good sold on that material is 30%, which is generally very high. And so, how do you reconcile that? The plumbing industry? I had buddies who are plumbers and that’s very common for them. Yeah, we made a huge spread, but our expenses were still really high as a percentage. But is that okay?

Megan (08:03):
Yeah, I mean it can be. I think you just have to be comfortable with what it is that you want to make, and all you have to sell are hours and material, and so you need to know if you have that built into your billable rate.

(08:18):
Are you going to make money at the end of the day? Are you comfortable with the amount that you’re making? It can be, okay. Our cost of goods can, depending on what we’re doing, if it’s primarily service or if we do a lot of new construction as well, we can be 50 to 60%. It just depends on what we’re doing. We can be 30%

Adam (08:38):
Plumbing is gross profit, 50% target for you too?

Megan (08:42):
So my service is going to be a little bit different, but I’m looking in that I still want to hit around 50%.

Adam (08:47):
Okay, gotcha. Okay, so let’s talk about labor for a second, Mike. I know in painting labor is, well, I think labor is for everybody’s the biggest, but for painting, I think it’s even more so because is that true? Is labor by far the biggest expense?

Mike (09:02):
Yeah. Labor, if you have in-house W2 employees, your labor should kind of be between 32 and 37% of the total job. If you use subcontractors 10 90 nines, that can be as high as 45%, maybe even 50%, depending on how much of the job they’re actually taking on.

(09:18):
They come with their tools, their insurance, all of that stuff. You’re going to give them a little bit more. But with that, ideally, you want to be around the 30 to 40% of cost of labor.

Adam (09:27):
So if you’re at let’s say 35% labor, and then you take 15% of the job is material, so that’s 50% right there. And so then we have overhead. Obviously, that’s a different conversation, but because labor, you can’t just say, oh, labor, that is the thing about business. That’s everything about business is the people that work with you. And so let’s get into some of maybe some leadership things. How can we pull that lever of profitability in our workforce to make more money without just saying, just go faster.

Mike (09:57):
Before we get into that, I want to just identify the three levers that you have to drive that. Number one is labor. There’s ways that we can talk about strategies to be more efficient with labor. Number two is materials. So there’s strategies and incentive structures to be more efficient with materials. But then number three, and often less talked about way to drive profitability is pricing and your ability to price and to sell is the highest leverage point that you have to maximizing your gross profit because if you can sell your jobs for 50% more, you don’t even have to worry about your cost of labor and cost of material. You’re going to be making a hundred percent more profit.

Megan (10:34):
Definitely. I mean you have to get the dollar in the door first and then the way to get it down to profitability is you just have to manage that material and that labor and the labor is a huge thing. And there’s all kinds of facets that we can get into about labor

Adam (10:50):
As a subpoint of the pricing point. Mike is upselling. So if you go in for a 5,000 job and the crew who’s doing the work says, Hey boss, why isn’t the ceiling on this ticket? Well, they said no at the time, but ask ’em, let’s do the ceiling. Now some are doing $800 more on the same day of same job, same people, and you just increased everybody’s so happy. And so I think upselling has a very direct, although often thought of it, indirect way of increasing gross profit because you just instantly elevate the ticket.

Mike (11:20):
To Megan’s point though, if you’re only at a 30% gross margin and you double your job, you’re still at a 30% gross margin. So you need to figure out your numbers before you start looking at adding more to it.

Megan (11:32):
And I think one of the things with labor, not just pricing it correctly, but understanding in the plumbing industry, so maybe it’s a service call that you have to do at a business, and it can only be after hours. So now your plumber has worked an eight-hour day, he’s got to start the shift at maybe four o’clock to 10 o’clock, whatever it is. When you have to go in, are you charging an after-hours rate? It needs to be so many times that it gets missed. You need to be charging accordingly for that time because you are paying your person after hours, you’re paying that additional overtime, and if you don’t build it into the price that you’re charging your customer, you’re losing.

Adam (12:10):
Sometimes we have clients who say, I really want to get this done and we just don’t have space for them on the calendar on Monday through Friday. And sometimes we’ll make an exception and say, Hey, everybody wants to come in on Saturday, then we’ll do this job. But here’s the thing, if we don’t charge extra for that job, then I’m paying for my client to get his gutters done. That’s not the kind of business I want to run. And so you say, Mr. Client, we can come on Saturday, it’s going to cost you a time and a half. Is that cool with you? Yeah, sure. Let’s just get it done. Then everybody’s happy, right? But if you don’t do that, if you’re last day you’re kind of lazy, you don’t really think about that, then you might as well not do the job at all.

Megan (12:42):
Correct.

Adam (12:43):
Well, this is a great conversation. I do want to pause for a minute with Megan and talk about Jobber. How has Jobber helped you make your business more profitable and impact that gross profit?

Megan (12:53):
I think it’s wonderful because it’s really easy to track my labor. Everything is on that job. I can easily go in, I can see exactly how many hours those people had if we’re going back on jobs, that hours right in there, I can see it. It makes it really easy to figure out was that profitable? Was that not profitable?

Adam (13:11):
Yeah, a hundred percent. And the reporting that Jobber has helps you track that too. So if you’re not using Jobber, then you need to know what your gross profit is. You can start job costing, and Jobber will help with all of that. So new users can getan  exclusive discount by going to Jobber.com/podcastdeal and start growing your business with Jobber and be more profitable today.

(13:31):
Let’s pretend our listeners are realizing, as they’re listening to this conversation, like, wow, I need to change some things. What do we do if we think that our labor costs are too high? Our labor costs are 45, 50% employees and then our materials are on top of that. We’re making like 5% net at the end of the day. That’s no good. So, what do we do if we realize that?

Mike (13:50):
For project-based based like painting or installs, I highly recommend moving to a piece rate system. And when I say piece rate, that basically means paying a set amount for the project. So if you have a $10,000 job and you know that it’s going to be a 100-hour project, you’re billing out $100 per hour, and that means that your painters have 100 hours to complete that project. So if they get done at a hundred hours, they’re going to pay for a hundred hours, but if they get done in 80 hours, they’re still going to get paid that a hundred hours. So they’re going to pay 20% more just for getting to the job done quicker. And your labor budget is actually a fixed percentage. All you’re going to pay is that a hundred hours no matter what.

Megan (14:30):
If you’re noticing your labor is high, I think you need to start drilling down on other things. So, did you have maybe some change orders? If it was a larger project, did you not bill for those hours? Did you not correctly charge? Was it an after-hours type situation where you have overtime that’s going into that labor? I also think for us, if I don’t have the right crews on the right job, it takes Joe 10 hours to do this project. It takes Mike five hours. I’m still billing the customer the same thing, but do I have the right people doing the right work that also really affects labor?

Adam (15:11):
I want to marry those two ideas because first, Mike mentioned piece rate paying a percentage of job, and then Megan’s talking about making sure the right people are assigned to the right jobs. That’s a really big dance. You could burn your people out really fast with piece rate if you send inexperienced people to do a job really fast. Let’s drill down in that a little bit. What are some hacks that we can do to make sure that we are assigning the right people so that we can chart pay piece rate? Because piece rate can be really, really good for qualified people. It can be an awesome system for them. How do we balance those two things?

Megan (15:42):
So I don’t deal with piece rate much, so I can’t really comment on that, but I mean, I definitely have service people that are going to run service, and they’re going to run a certain type of service. I have people who just do drain cleaning. I’m going to have people that are doing more of the residential high-end homes. I’m going to have people that are doing more of the commercial type stuff and it’s knowing this person is in that lane and when it gets really busy and maybe I need to fill in, I just need to be conscious of that and okay, he’s not going to do it as fast. I’m going to be taking a hit on this. Can I take a hit in it? Do I have enough in this job budget to be able to do that or not?

Adam (16:18):
I see what you’re saying.

Mike (16:20):
Yeah, I think it’s twofold. Number one is to talk to your people and ask them what they like to do. And then number two is review your numbers, review your job costing after the projects are done. Keeping in mind which painters or which techs were on each project at that time, I had a crew of painters who was really, really good at trim jobs, so they would go and they would paint an entire trim of a home in a day. And I had another crew of painters that were really, really good at spraying projects, and you did not switch them because the trim painters could not spray. It would take them weeks to spray a home, and you could not make the sprayers paint a trim, like paint a trim job. You just wouldn’t switch it. But they were each really happy in their respective lanes. And what we would say is they would crush budgets, and they were making like 40, 50 bucks an hour just painting. They could paint really quickly within the budgets.

Megan (17:10):
And I think the making sure, asking your employees, it’s that simple, what do you like doing? And keeping them in the lane that they like, they’re going to be happier. They have a higher satisfaction rate. So then that, in turn, they’re more productive. If we get to the end of the day and there’s 15 minutes of work left, but it’s four o’clock, it’s four o’clock, we should go, a good crew is going to go, you know what? We’ll just finish it today, and then we don’t have to do that trip back and pull the tools out and do all that. That’s what really helps pull that profitability. So if you have happy people that are just giving it their all, it shows up in the numbers.

Mike (17:47):
I’ve had crews start new projects at one o’clock on Friday because that’s how motivated they were with piece rate.

Adam (17:54):
Painting is great example for piece, rate. Actually gutters is too with piece rate. You just say, Hey, you go as fast as you want to. I don’t care how fast you go, I’m going to pay the same.

Mike (18:03):
But you do have to layer in quality, which is the guys or the girls who are responsible for the job have to be the ones responsible for the touchup, and ideally give them a bonus for collecting the check and getting a Google review if you can do those.

(18:18):
A lot of people don’t like piece rate because you get bad quality, but if the painters are the ones doing the walkthrough, having to face that homeowner, look ’em in the eyes, this is my work, they’re going to be a lot more likely to do a good job.

Adam (18:27):
So talking about gross profit and efficiency of labor, Megan, how do you, in plumbing which has service technicians and it’s very different, how do you incentivize fastness efficiency and speed? How do you do that?

Megan (18:42):
Yeah, so we have a bonus program. One of the factors that we’re looking at, we do use our gross profit percentage as a driver for what our bonus pool is going to be. And that’s one of the things that we’re going through that seems to incentivize pretty well. And then honestly, I mean I just have really, really good people. I’m lucky to have that, but I’m constantly checking in with them so knowing are they satisfied? Is there something wrong? I’m not waiting for an annual review to know is there a problem or not.

Adam (19:10):
Are you transparent with what the gross profit raw number is? So they know that we made $50,000 this week and we’re going to get an X percentage of that number. So you’re very transparent with them about that.

Megan (19:21):
It’s a formula that includes gross profit, but it factors in the rest of my operating expenses. So I take an average of gross profit and an average of my operating expenses, and then that helps build the pool because I want them to recognize that their labor hours do affect profitability. But then also my people in the office and how well the guys are communicating to people in the office, how well they’re doing that work also affects the net, my net number.

Adam (19:47):
Interesting. But you’re not paying them a percentage on net?

Megan (19:50):
No.

Adam (19:50):
Because that would be too far down the bottom. You’re finding a middle road number it sounds like.

Megan (19:54):
Yeah, I take an average of gross profit and then I take an average of my net and that helps build our bonus pool and then our bonuses are paid out of that.

Adam (20:03):
Okay, interesting. You guys ever heard of Bonus app? We use Bonus app with my gutter company. It’s basically an app that integrates a Jobber. You set your productivity rate, so if they hit a certain productivity rate, then they get the difference between a percentage you’ve already programmed in with hourly workers. It works really well because it incentivizes them to work faster to hit those productivity hours, and then they get a bonus if they do work faster. And so our listeners can take a look at that.

(20:28):
Talking about gross profit and the numbers that tweak that. The leverage is that labor and materials. What else can their pricing in pricing exactly. Upsells, right? There’s other things. Yeah. So what else we, our listeners do to make sure that their gross profit’s healthy? If their gross profit’s unhealthy, then their business is unhealthy.

Mike (20:47):
Yeah, there’s labor, there’s materials, and then there’s pricing. And I want to just separate pricing from upsells because if you have a $5,000 job that you’re going to make $2,500 on, but you sell that job for $6,000, now you’re going to make $3,500 on it. You increase your job price by less than 20%, 18%, and you added almost 40% to your gross profit. So, a small increase in price, all else being equal, same material, same labor will have an outsized return when it comes to gross profit.

Adam (21:21):
Every dollar that you add to the price is isn’t just net game for you.

Mike (21:25):
Yeah, a hundred percent. So that means become a good salesperson, understand sales, have great customer experience, be really thorough in your estimates and your proposals. Answer all the questions, provide pricing on the spot. Go through some professional sales training, read some sales books. If you’re a painter and you want to learn how to do sales, talk to me. And that will allow you to increase your price and make more money.

Adam (21:46):
I mean, pricing can be a whole different topic, but let’s get into a little bit. How do you make sure that you are pricing appropriately for jobs?

Megan (21:51):
I do most of the bidding for larger projects, and so I know what we need to hit for gross profits, so that’s getting built in, but then I’m also factoring that into our billable rates. So I’m making sure that our overheads, the pieces that aren’t as apparent your time, that isn’t direct doing. So you went out, you met with a homeowner, you met with a homeowner 2, 3, 4 times…

Adam (22:14):
Right? Free,

Megan (22:16):
Right, right. Those are hours that you need to build into that job, otherwise you’re not making anything on that. So that needs to get built into that project or into billable rates in order to make the money.

Adam (22:28):
I think that when I talk to my technicians and they say, well, we had to go back or Oh, well this, say guys, all that costs money. You can’t just say, well, this, well that it all costs money. And so who’s going to pay for it? Am I going to pay for it? Are you going to pay for it? Is the client going to pay for it? I’d prefer the client pay for it, to be honest.

Mike (22:44):
The nice thing about piece rate is that the team is responsible for any go-backs or touch-ups, right? So if there’s any go-backs, any touch-ups, it comes out of the fixed hour budget. You have a hundred hours on the project, you took 89 hours to finish it, but then you had to go back three times like, well, you’re at 105 hours now, you’re still getting paid for a hundred, so it’s your time. So that incentivizes them to not just be quick, but to be thorough and to make sure that you don’t leave any touch-ups.

Adam (23:08):
I think there’s been a great conversation about labor and materials. I’m going to go back to materials for a second because I think number one is labor. I think our listeners who are, if there gross profit’s a mess, they need to address their labor first.

(23:17):
And then I think materials and a journey that I’ve been on recently is talking to vendors and making sure I have this relationship with my vendors to make sure we’re getting really good pricing because vendors can get a little sloppy too and start to take advantage a little bit and take you for granted and stuff. And so I’ll call to your vendor and say, Hey, I tried out another vendor last week. They’ll set up straight and start listening better. And so not to strong arm, I want to have a relationship with my vendors, but I think, have you guys ever experienced that where, because you guys have a lot of vendor stuff going on with your materials and stuff, how have you addressed vendors to make sure that you really are getting the best price at a good product and everything, but how do you guys address that kind of stuff?

Megan (23:52):
Vendor relationships is huge, not just having one vendor that you can go to, but multiple vendors because there are times where I can only get that product from A, B, C, or whomever. And being able to talk with them and be honest, what can you do? What’s your best price? When we have major projects, we’re sending it out to three, four vendors so that they can give us pricing back. But then I’m also going to factor in, are they cheaper? Is it $500 cheaper? Is it a thousand dollars cheaper? What is it? But then, what is their service level like too? Are they on time? Do they deliver well? Is it going to cost me where they were supposed to show up on Tuesday with a product, and they didn’t, and it’s Wednesday, and I had guys sitting there all day doing nothing. So you have to factor that into, it’s not always just the cheapest price

Mike (24:38):
Or in the painting space. If you’re using a company like Sherwin Williams who has huge market share, 70% market share, talk to your paint rep and tell them the top three or four products that you want to be using all year and the intentions on how much you want to buy and get them to give you better pricing on it. And as long as you tell ’em that you have a good conversation with them, you’re communicative with them, they’re going to give you way better pricing.

(24:59):
And one thing that we skipped over, I really don’t want to miss this because it was important when it comes to pricing, you said, how do you figure out that you’re pricing in the right realm? A lot of guys charge by square footage, and I think that’s antiquated. It’s not a good way to price because it’s not good. You need to factor in and understand what a charge rate is. And a charge rate is how much is your company billing per hour on average? So you take your total job, say it’s a $10,000 job and you divide it by your a hundred hours. Well, you charged out a hundred dollars per hour in the painting space, at least you should be between 75 and $90 per hour around there. If you’re below that, you need to up your prices. If you’re above that and you’re selling good, awesome. But between 75 and 90 needs to be your charge rate.

Adam (25:38):
Yeah, I like that. That’s awesome.

Mike (25:40):
Yeah.

Adam (25:40):
When it comes to materials, even if you just shave off one or two percentages off, that cost from 12% to 10%, a percentage of a large number is a big number. And so I just want to encourage our listeners that there’s so much money to be saved in these little places. A little bit here, a little bit there. Spread out a long period of time is a lot of money.

Mike (25:59):
2% savings of material going from 12% to 10% on a million-dollar business is 20 grand.

Adam (26:05):
A lot of money.

Mike (26:05):
That’s net profit.

Adam (26:06):
It goes in your pocket.

Mike (26:07):
Yeah.

Adam (26:08):
Well, this has been great. I’m going to summarize it through actual items here. Number one is you have to job cost your jobs. You just have to start doing that. You have to actually stop guessing, figure out how much you’re making by looking at the total job revenue, minus your expenses, and actually do it, and you’ll learn so much. Number two is to make sure you’re charging for your time as the owner. You’re going out. Make sure you’re charging a fair market price for your time, especially when you’re going out to people’s houses. And it takes a lot of time. And so you have to make sure you’re charging for your own time, even if you’re in the field as well. And the number three is your vendors and your materials. Materials are a big cost in business, and so make sure that you’re talking with your vendors and getting the best price. And also, you’re not wasting materials. You have to make sure that you keep it tight because one or two percentage points is a big, big number. You guys, any final big tips to leave with our listeners, Megan?

Megan (26:59):
Just being really cognizant of charging for after-hours. You need to charge a premium for that because you’re likely paying your employees a premium for that.

Mike (27:08):
My big tip would be that a small increase in price can result in a large increase in profitability.

Adam (27:15):
Guys, thanks for being here. Megan. How do people find out more about you?

Megan (27:18):
Check out toptierplumber.com. You can find all about me there.

Mike (27:23):
And if you go to paintergrowth.com/Jobber if your painter or anyone, I guess I have a job costing spreadsheet and training video that you can use if you want to get started with job costing.

Adam (27:34):
Well, guys, thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. Our listeners got a lot out of that episode. So, Mike, Megan, keep it up. You guys are having a big impact on your communities, so keep it up. And thank you for listening. I hope that you heard something today that will help you make more money. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester. You can find [email protected]. Your team and your clients deserve your very best, so go give it to ’em.