True labor cost per tech, per hour
Wage + burden (taxes, workers' comp, benefits) + non-billable time, fully loaded. If you're pricing off the wage alone, every job is underpriced before it starts.
Resources · Benchmarks
The Numbers You Can't Plan Without.
Ten numbers every trades owner should know cold — not because they're interesting, but because you can't make a real decision without them. If you don't know where you stand on these, you're guessing.
Margin & Pricing
Margin & Pricing — what your work is actually worth
Gross margin by revenue stream, not blended
Service, install, and commercial/new construction run on different economics. A blended P&L can show a healthy number while one stream is quietly subsidizing another.
Billing rate multiplier
What you need to bill per hour, relative to base wage, to actually clear a target margin after burden and overhead. Without it, pricing is a guess.
Net profit margin
The scoreboard number. Everything above feeds into this one, and it's the one that tells you if the business as a whole is actually working.
Cash
Cash — because profit and cash aren't the same thing
13-week cash position, not just this month's P&L
A profitable month can still drain the bank. Financed installs, deposits, and payroll that runs regardless of when customers pay all move on different timelines than "profit."
AR aging (days sales outstanding)
Money owed that isn't collected doesn't fund payroll. If you don't know your aging, you don't actually know your cash position — you're estimating it.
WIP and over/underbillings (project-based work)
Billings ahead of costs can look like profit until the job's actual cost catches up. This is the number your bank or bonding agent will ask for, and most shops can't produce it.
Capacity
Capacity — what your people and trucks are actually producing
Technician or crew utilization rate
Billable hours divided by available hours. Tells you whether you need to hire, need better dispatching, or are already overstaffed.
Revenue per technician (or per truck)
A capacity benchmark that separates "we need more people" from "we need to run the people we have better."
Booked ratio (close rate on calls)
Below your benchmark, it's a pricing or a dispatch problem, not a marketing problem — and the fix is different depending on which one it is.
If you can't answer these ten cold, that's not a knock — it's the reason job costing and real financial visibility exist. That's what Ground and Gauge are built to fix.
Ready to know where you actually stand?
Start with a free call. We'll walk through the numbers that matter most for your shop and show you how to get them right.