How I was losing £40k a month and didn’t even realise it.
In my driveway business, after labour and overheads, we had a rule:
£1,000 a day profit per team.
That meant:
£5,000 a week profit per team
x 4 teams
= £20,000 a week
x 4 weeks
= £80,000 a month profit
Sounds great, right?
The problem is, over 8 years, I can count on one hand the amount of times we even made £50,000 in a month.
At the time, I was delighted.
I thought making £40k–£50k profit a month was brilliant.
But what I failed to realise was this:
Based on how we were pricing, what we were projecting, and what each team should have been producing…
we were actually losing £30k–£40k a month against target.
Read that again.
I wasn’t comparing our performance to where it should have been.
I was comparing it to where we’d come from.
That is thinking small.
And it cost me hundreds of thousands.
If I had simply tightened things up and got that monthly profit from £40k to even £60k, that’s another £240,000 a year in profit.
This is exactly why proper pricing matters so much in the trade industry.
Because so much can go wrong:
Staff issues.
Supplier issues.
Client delays.
Weather.
Mistakes.
Low productivity.
Poor planning.
All of it eats profit.
That’s why you need to:
Price properly
Build in contingency
Track team performance
Monitor productivity
Know your numbers
Have systems in place to protect margin
Because turnover means nothing.
Even “good profit” can be hiding bad performance.
And most trade business owners are leaving serious money on the table without even knowing it.
That was me once.
It doesn’t need to be you. Book a call with me today
