Six Outdated Price Lists. One Meeting. $70,000 Found.
An HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) contractor in the Tampa Bay area had her best revenue year ever — $125,000 more than the prior year. But when the numbers came in, her profit was identical to the year before. Not one additional dollar.
Will departmentalized her books by service line. Equipment costs in change-out work were running six gross margin points worse than the prior year. Six of her eight vendor price lists had not been updated in nine months or more. She had been selling at last year's prices with this year's costs.
Will called a meeting. Showed her one number. She updated her pricing.
Representative image — construction financial discovery session
$47,000 in Uncollected Retainage Found in the First Review
A general contractor had three active commercial projects with retainage held by the owner. None was tracked systematically. By the first session, two projects had retainage aging past 90 days with no collection process initiated. Will implemented a tracking schedule and collection process. All retainage was collected within 45 days.
Two Projects. Same Scope. Very Different Margins. One Explanation.
A pool contractor could not explain why two nearly identical projects produced different profit results. Job-level cost analysis revealed a material markup inconsistency on certain project types — a markup developed three years prior that had never been updated as pool equipment costs increased. Corrected going forward.
Could Your Business Have a Similar Story?
The profit leaks in these stories were not the result of bad management. They were the result of not having someone looking at the right numbers at the right time. Book a free Profit Leak Assessment and find out what yours are.
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