What most owners get wrong
You don’t need thirty KPIs. You need five. Most trades owners track none of them, and the ones who try to track ten get buried in spreadsheets, get bored by month three, and quit. Then there are the ones who only watch revenue. Revenue feels good. Revenue doesn’t tell you whether you made any money.
Here are the five worth knowing. Anything outside this list is noise.
1. Gross margin per job
Not revenue. Margin.
A $12,000 re-roof sounds great until you back out materials, dump fees, the crew’s wages, and a slice of the truck. What’s left over is the only number that pays you. Some owners watch the deposit hit the bank and think they had a good week. They didn’t. They had cash flow. That’s a different thing.
You don’t need fancy software to start. A spreadsheet with two columns gets you most of the way there: revenue minus direct cost. Do it on every job for a month and patterns appear. Maybe your small service calls run at twelve percent and your install work runs at forty. Now you know where the money lives. Most owners are surprised at the answer.
2. Quote close rate
Quotes you sent. Quotes that turned into work. Divide the second by the first.
A sixty percent close rate is healthy. Eighty means you’re probably underpricing, the customers who said yes felt like they were stealing it. Thirty means your pricing is too high for the market, or your follow-up is broken, or both. Usually it’s the second one. People hear the number, ask for time to think, and never hear from you again because nobody called them back.
The fix is rarely the price. It’s almost always the follow-up. Send the quote, text two days later, text a week after that, then let it go. Watch which touch closed the deal. A chunk of your wins came on a follow-up nobody bothers with.
3. Average ticket size
Revenue from every job last month. Divided by the number of jobs. That’s your average ticket.
It’s the easiest number to move and the one nobody watches. A trade that does forty jobs a month at $400 each is making $16k. Same trade with the same forty jobs at $550 each is making $22k. Same crew. Same trucks. Same hours. The difference is one extra upsell per visit, or a price increase you’ve been putting off for two years, or tighter scoping on the small stuff so you stop doing $80 calls.
Look at it monthly. When the number slides, ask yourself whether you’ve been quoting last year’s prices on this year’s materials.
4. Repeat and referral percentage
Of the jobs booked this month, how many came from somebody you’ve worked for before, or somebody they sent your way?
That number is your real marketing dashboard. Paid ads buy the first job. Repeats and referrals buy the next ten. If your repeat-and-referral percentage is under a third, your retention is bleeding somewhere and you don’t see it yet. Over half, and you’ve built something that compounds, you can spend less on Google every year instead of more.
How to track it without buying software: ask one question when you book a job. “How’d you find us?” Write the answer somewhere you’ll see at month-end. A sticky note on the dispatch board works fine. Then count.
5. Cash on hand, in weeks of payroll
Not your bank balance in dollars. Your bank balance, divided by what it actually costs to keep the lights on for a week.
Two weeks is a panic number. Four is uncomfortable. Eight is healthy. Twelve means you can take a slow January without laying anyone off. This is a survival metric, not a vanity one, and it’s the one that quietly decides whether the business is still here next year.
Most trades that fold don’t fold from a bad month. They fold from a string of mediocre months that drew the cash buffer down to zero before anybody noticed. By the time you do notice, you’re calling your accountant on a Friday afternoon, and the answer is the wrong answer.
Check it every Monday. Same time. Same way. Write the number down somewhere you’ll see it again.
“Most trades that fold don't fold from a bad month. They fold from a string of mediocre ones nobody was watching.
What you can leave alone
Plenty of stuff sounds important and isn’t.
Website traffic. Social followers. Truck count. Square footage of your shop. None of those tell you whether the business is healthy. They feel like progress because the line goes up. They don’t pay you.
Margin, close rate, ticket size, repeat percentage, cash buffer. That’s the whole list. If you only ever knew those five and updated them once a month, you’d be running tighter than most of your competition.
Where ToolbagCRM fits
Half the reason these numbers go untracked is the math is a chore. Pulling revenue out of QuickBooks. Costs out of a shoebox of receipts. Quotes out of a notebook. Close rates out of memory.
A CRM that already has the quote, the job, the cost, and the invoice in one place does the arithmetic for you. ToolbagCRM rolls up margin per job, the close rate on every outstanding quote, the average ticket by month, and the lead source on every booked job. The numbers are sitting there when you want them, no spreadsheet needed.
Founders pricing is $99 for your first three months, then $150 every month after that, unlimited users for as long as the account stays open.
Revenue per job is a vanity number. Subtract materials and labor to get the figure that actually pays you.
A simple ratio. If it's under fifty percent on small jobs, your follow-up is the gap, not your price.
Revenue divided by job count. The easiest lever in the business, and the one nobody pulls.
Stick the answer somewhere you'll see at month-end. The split of paid vs. repeat vs. referral is your real marketing dashboard.
Bank balance divided by weekly burn. Two weeks is a panic number. Eight is healthy. Write it down each week.