
Contractor Cuts
Join the ProStruct360 team on the Contractor Cuts podcast as we delve into the ins and outs of building and sustaining a thriving contracting business. Gain valuable insights and actionable tips from our experts who have successfully grown their own contracting company from the ground up.
Our show is dedicated to helping contractors like you unlock the secrets to increased profitability, efficient organization, and seamless processes within your company. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting out, our episodes cover key topics essential for your business growth and long-term success.
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Contractor Cuts
A Contractor's Guide to Success in 2025 Episode 3: Mastering Financial Management for Profitability
This episode emphasizes the paramount importance of financial management in contracting businesses, specifically for effective planning as you head into 2025. We explore the necessity of tracking financial data, the impact of understanding key terms, and practical steps for improving financial literacy to boost profitability.
• The significance of financial planning for 2025
• Understanding and categorizing essential financial terms
• Dangers of relying on mental tracking and bank account balances
• Importance of establishing a strong foundation for expense tracking
• Strategies for assessing profitability at the job level
• Practical tools for managing finances effectively
• Regular assessment of financial health as a business rhythm
• Immediate steps listeners can take to improve their financial understanding
Struggling to grow your contracting business? The Foundations Program is designed to help contractors break free from the chaos and build a business that runs smoothly. You’ll get a customized training program, 1-on-1 coaching, and access to a full paperwork database—including contracts and the Client Engagement Agreement. Join the Foundations Program today! 🚀
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Welcome to Contractor Cuts, where we cover the good, the bad and the ugly of growing a successful contracting company.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Contractor Cuts. My name is Clark Turner and I'm James McConnell. Thanks for joining us again this week. So today we had a little bit of a pause from last episode because we're on our winter retreat where we do our growth retreat with everyone we coach and everyone else that comes along growing their company into the new year, which was super great, super successful, really fun. But today we're diving into part three. We had a blast. We did have a blast in Nashville. I think we had the most fun we've ever had.
Speaker 1:There was a million stories. There was a fight, not our people. There was a fight there was a fight, not our people. There was a fight yeah, was that?
Speaker 2:there was a fight at the um coyote ugly? Oh, that's right. We stayed like two doors down and above like the main strip and, uh, that's right, there was a fight at coyote ugly and there was a dude playing in the boot barn or the freebird boot place.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was like your favorite. Oh my God, unhinged, so so check them out.
Speaker 2:Spencer oh, I have no idea, his name was Spencer.
Speaker 1:I was thoroughly entertained. It was fun, it was a lot of fun. Honestly, he had a good voice.
Speaker 2:He did. He had some political views as well. He had a lot of views. He he was. It wasn't a one-man show, it was a one-man full show. We had a lot of fun If you were there with us.
Speaker 2:Thanks for joining us. It was a blast. If you didn't make it, you couldn't make it. We'd love to circle up.
Speaker 2:I'm doing some follow-ups in February and March of one-day blasts for your company where we cover everything that we did on the retreat but help you get growth in your company and framing around what 2025 should look like. If growth in your company and framing around what 2025 should look like. If you want to get that, go to our website, hit the contact us and let me know and while I'll reach out to you personally, but anyways, it was great. That's why we were on a little bit of a hiatus for a few weeks, but this week we're picking up on the part three of the series that we're doing and we're talking about planning finances going into 2025, what you need to be looking at, why and how we look at them and, honestly, like it sounds boring and it is boring and it's something to where we need to understand the value of gathering our data as a company financially to where that allows us to make decisions for the company. So one thing where this really is apparent is on these retreats where we sit down and go through the financial section, where we're kind of forecasting financially, when you haven't been tracking, you don't have all the numbers put together over the last year it's very difficult to lay out what the next year is going to look like. You can't take those numbers and say, okay, well, we're averaging X amount of revenue per month with this amount, we've been bidding jobs at this profit percentage, but they're all ending at this other profit percentage. So how do we increase that?
Speaker 2:Tweaking the dollars and making sure you understand your finances moving forward and projections moving forward can't be done today. It starts last year, it starts six months ago, eight months ago, 12 months ago. Laying out and collecting the data properly to where you can see that stuff. You can open up QuickBooks, run a quick report, open up ProStrux 360, see where your numbers are. So a lot of what we do with planning finances if you are behind the eight ball is more what you need to start tracking. So in six months to a year from now we can start analyzing that data together, and so that's what we're talking about today, kind of what you should be tracking what you're looking at.
Speaker 2:I'd like to dive in with you about what you're looking at data-wise in construction companies, in what we're running and I know for you you're more on the new. I mean, I've been doing QuickBooks for 20 years. You were kind of on the learn how to do it. What should we be looking at? How do I analyze this data? So I think it's a good yin and yang in terms of kind of. I love to know what you're looking at and why you're looking at and what you're trying to find in your numbers. I know you've got different spreadsheets that you've started, you've stopped and you've started some other ones trying to figure out what data is helpful for you to look at, and so I think that's what we can talk about today, as well as understanding the important financial data.
Speaker 2:So in a company baseline, there's some terms that you have to know. There's some terms that we always use, obviously, revenue, that's the total amount you've invoiced. Cost of goods sold and for us, we do cost of goods sold as anything spent on that specific job site that couldn't be tied to another job site. So for us, cost of goods sold, materials and labor for the job, I'm not counting the gas driving to and from the job because my project manager hit four jobs that day and so I'm not going to sit there and divide up the gas four ways. But other companies do. Other companies tie direct payroll. If I'm a commercial company doing a large job and I've got a foreman working on one job for the next three months, maybe I do tie that paycheck to that job. But again, that's the strategy that you're going to. We'll dive into if you're in the coaching side as to how to how to delineate where what dollars are cost of goods versus what's overhead expenses.
Speaker 2:But, that being said, revenue, cost of goods, looking at that, understanding what is and isn't cost of goods, and then what profit percentage you need because what is our overhead cost, what's our cost of goods? And then what profit percentage you need because what is our overhead cost, what's our cost of goods, overhead costs and those equal your net profits, everything at the end, what we're catching in our net at the end of the day, how much money am I making. And so, understanding all of those different levels of dollars and there's some more that we have itemized, with owner pay draws and what we can get into a little bit of that today, but that's kind of a whole podcast on its own is how to pay yourself as an owner. But looking at that, analyzing your numbers as a construction company and having all of those different categories where you know I spend this much on labor on every job on average, where you know I spend this much on labor on every job on average, you know I spend 21% of all of my dollars go to materials for my jobs. I know that that's a set number. I know 47% of every dollar is going to go to labor on the job. So those combined is 68, 69%. So that means it's going to be 31, 32% profit. From that profit. I now have to pull out my overhead expenses, my gas, my truck, my rent, all of that stuff, right? Hoos, or what sits your hoos or what sits Thingamabobs, your small businessman magazine subscription monthly, right, there's all those types of things that we got to pull out of that 30%, 31%, that's left over and whatever's left over from that is your actual profit, right? And so, understanding those numbers, you can't look today and figure what that was for the last 12 months if you haven't been tracking the numbers. So everything that we do.
Speaker 2:If you're trying to boil down, how do I start getting a grasp on my finances? How do I start assessing, looking at and understanding my numbers? I would say number one we're going to start with tracking three main things we're going to look at. I want to know every dollar I spend on labor per job. I want to look at every material expense I spent per job and I want to look at my overhead number. Those three I can deduct backwards right. Revenue I can track because that's how many invoices I've sent. But those three numbers are stuff that people don't track. People don't know, and that's how we decide how much can I take home, how much should my salary be as an owner? How much can I bonus myself if we had a really good couple months? Understanding labor, materials and overhead is kind of your baseline is where you need to start.
Speaker 2:Why don't people track it though? I think people, that's a good question. I think a lot of people one man shows especially. They track it in their head and it's kind of the the pop mentality of well, you know, I, I got all this. I'm looking at my bank account. I've got 30,000 in there. I know I got to pay Juan for those three jobs he did, so I'm going to cut him a $2,000 check and so you kind of track where your money's going weekly in your brain.
Speaker 2:But you're not grabbing all that data and writing it down. So I see that I can look in how many checks I wrote out for labor and I can say, oh, I spent $300,000 on labor in the last six months. That's easy to do, to pull that type of number. What's hard to do is say I spent $3,168 on labor on this job. I had budgeted $2,000. So I spent $1,100 over.
Speaker 2:Let's dive into that. And so you start looking at per job level. Proshark 360 does that for you. It's where you track all of your payments. It pulls all the materials in from QuickBooks and allows you to look at the jobs on a micro level. But then you can also zoom out and I can look at a project manager of mine on a macro level and say, okay, this project manager is hitting 28% profit, this project manager is at 32% profit. So where are we missing between these two guys? How do I get this guy's numbers up? How do how is this guy hitting those numbers. But then you also can do budgeting with that, like if we get our revenue.
Speaker 2:One thing we did on the retreat we figured out what everyone had to take home, what's the minimum. Right, we have a minimum, an ideal, and then somewhere in the middle is like I want to take my kids to the movie, so I need to make a little more than the minimum just to pay my bills, what's comfortable for me? So we got to that number and then we work backwards. So if that's the number, what's my profit percentage on jobs? And so what does my revenue need to be? And so, looking at it backwards, you're saying, hey, I can't bid a job under 22% or I'm losing money on this Because I have to hit $ 150,000 a month in revenue to even take home what I need to take home.
Speaker 2:And so gathering that data and helping understand it allows you to pull different levers, like, hey, maybe we need to get out of the office lease and cut that dollar out. Maybe we need to go ahead and get an office because we've got some extra money. We're trying to have a spot where I can hire some people in. You can make all of those decisions if you know what is going to come in the future by looking at the past of your rhythm, of how the money's coming in and going out. So I think, people, the pot method of well, my bank account was at 20, now it's at 40,000, so we're doing good is a way that guys run companies where it's like, well, no, you got three deposits on jobs, you actually are going to have to spend about 60.
Speaker 2:That money's spoken for. Money's spoken for. It's not. You can't go buy that truck, you can't go sign an office lease, but more jobs will come. That's true, and I know that this guy's going to sign with us. So I'm fine, I'm good to go. So, understanding stuff, looking at it, I think how do we assess that? Data is where people get stuck and it's like I don't need you to figure out what you're assessing today. I need you to start gathering data and organizing it in the right way.
Speaker 1:I think that guys get and this is me talk, this is me talking to me guys get into this and when you first start in on it, it's easier to track in your head. There's not a lot going on. It's like, oh no, that's easy, that guy is this, that guy is that. As soon as you start growing, that revenue number is getting bigger, there's more jobs, there's more jobs. There's more differentiation between the jobs. It becomes really difficult to know.
Speaker 1:But 8,000 of that's going for this guy and this guy at this job and 3000 of it is going to this guy and this guy. But also we have to buy the windows and the doors. But we could wait on the windows and the doors because I really want to pay for this program that I think is going to help us. And if you're not tracking your overall numbers, if you're not getting into the macro, you can, with a profitable company, screw yourself. Yeah, like on accident, because you're not looking at. Okay, this money is only going to take us this far. So how do I be a good steward of the money that I have right now? Yeah, and sometimes it's the least sexy way. It's like that literally every dime of that is spoken for. So you just have to hunker down, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, and hold that money. What is my monthly overhead costs? If I'm spending $18,000 a month on overhead, that's, I feel like I got a lot of money in the bank today but in three weeks it's gone. Yeah, right. And so what, understanding what's coming, what's going, what has to be paid. And then it also says, like, if my overhead is $18,000, including what I'm taking home and my insurance and all that stuff, I have to at minimum I can do the math real quickly.
Speaker 2:But whatever it is, I have to be doing $100,000 a month of revenue at a profit margin of 25%, because there's going to be some slippage, because I have to at least hit 18%. Yeah, because on a hundred thousand that's $18,000. So the first hundred thousand dollars is breakeven. And so if I'm invoicing one, 20 on average, that $20,000 that I'm making profit on that, straight profit, right. And so, understanding, what's my minimum invoice to cover my overhead and expenses? And then, beyond that, how much can I do without hiring anybody like a project manager? How much more can I do with just me or just my team that I have All of that's profit? That's straight profit from the jobs. But knowing that is, I can't invoice for less than 20%, I can't do a job, it's my buddy I'm going to do, cost plus at 15%, well, you're over. It's 18% of your revenue. So it'd be cheaper to cut your buddy a check instead of losing 3% on his job and tying your cruise up for a month and a half, I would say for, and not everybody.
Speaker 1:Well, I would say that the majority of people in our world don't like the accounting side, uh, but I do think it's important. Like the getting a low level accountant is, I think, totally good, but I wouldn't immediately hire number one. You don't have the money to, uh. But some people that's like their first big purchase is like I'm going to hire somebody to do my accounting. You need to understand it and so, even if you're going to pay an accountant, don't? You cannot just rely on them doing your monthly books and your monthly reconciliations, because in our world things can happen in the scope of a couple of weeks, a couple of days, like massive things can change. You need to be able to know what the reaction needs to be based on that.
Speaker 2:And if you don't?
Speaker 1:know how to do your accounting. If you don't even have a semblance of an idea, it's going to be tough sledding.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you don't need to be a QuickBooks master.
Speaker 1:I hate it.
Speaker 2:I really hate it, but you've learned this is the three spots, seven spots, whatever it is that I go in and I know. And you've learned how to run reports. You've learned how to look at a P&L. You've learned how to categorize materials and expenses. You've learned kind of the minimum. And I mean I've done that with a lot of guys that coach like I don't need you to learn everything in here, because most of the stuff in here is done by the software pushing it here, so you have to touch it. All I need you to do are these four things. Just learn these four things and that's all you need and from there you can pass it and bring in a CPA that's going to handle a lot of it for you. But you need to know what levers levers they're pulling and pushing so you can help make the decisions as a business owner. Yeah, I mean it's not.
Speaker 1:It is not black and white. When you sit, when you're meeting with an accountant, like it's not going to be oh, thank God, they're not your CFO you need to know how to explain what you want and they're typically not the type of person that's like here's here, come, come here. Like this is not the accountant mentality. I'm going to show you how to do all this stuff and if you do this, you do that. It's like uh, what's the input? I'll give you the output most accountants aren't creative.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just a different brain. Yeah, function for someone going into accounting. I think one thing that I've seen too with like especially one man shows the better guys guys are at finances and math and numbers that brain of a person, the almost worse it is, because they get deeper into doing it in their head and carrying everything in their head. I had such a great I had these manila folders when I first started for the first long time. I think they were gone by the time you got here, but a manila folder where I'd put the estimate, invoices, receipts.
Speaker 1:Did you also have a?
Speaker 2:candy dish full of caramels yes, jeez, that's an old man. But on the back of it I had four sections on the folder of what I wrote where, and so I had, like my material section where anytime I made a purchase I wrote it down. But then I could like, okay, it was a way to organize it and that's how most guys do it. But that works when I'm running four jobs myself and that's it. Yeah. The problem is, when I brought Jared on as my first employee, I taught him how to do it and now I'm not. I don't, I don't have any visibility on his numbers. Sure, he's got folders in his truck with some numbers written on it, but everything that I'm finding out financially at that point is reactive a month later. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Manila folders don't scale. That's a shirt. That's a bumper.
Speaker 2:Put it on the shirt. So again, a lot. The more you can keep it in your head, the further you're going to be able to go without having a planned system of data collection and financial management, and so it's dangerous.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:I mean for you, when you you, when you stepped into the, the gm kind of ownership role where you're more over the numbers and what's happening, it was great because you were like, clark, how do I? I'm like I don't know, I just I just do it. You're like, well, I need to figure out how to do that, because that's not your, that's not my brain, yeah, and so it. That was helpful for me to understand what was lacking in our like, where the holes that I'm just patching with my brain that we need to kind of have down systematically to to identify this stuff. So, how much time do you personally? This is different for everybody in your business, all right, next question Now how much time do you spend in QuickBooks and assessing finances on a weekly basis?
Speaker 2:Like, what's your rhythm for knowing the numbers in one city, in Austin, by itself, when you're looking over those numbers, what are you looking at? How often do you assess? Do you have like a time block for it? What do you do in that? Fill me in behind the curtain for you, specifically for your brain.
Speaker 1:When there's less going on, it's way more frequent because I'm like budgeting down to the dollar. But when there's more work happening, it's easier to kind of have a healthy rhythm with it. Yeah, I know that. I know that we're going to be sending out invoices. I know that we're going to be paying crews out on Wednesday. I got to go in and pay out what's been completed in the software. On Wednesday, which means Monday, I'm looking at the bank accounts and looking at QuickBooks. What's? Just getting a rough idea of what's left the account or came into the account over the weekend. Where are we and how much rope do we have until I can't mark down income? Yeah Right, so Honestly, three times a week I'm probably looking at it Monday, wednesday when I'm paying people out, and then Friday just so that I can sleep over the weekend.
Speaker 2:Well, and to back up a little bit one thing that I would say that you do well, you're not just looking at the dollar in the bank account, we're looking at job, A send an invoice for $8,600. Yeah, and I've got 6,000 to spend on outgoing money, so when is that 8,600 coming in and when am I going to release these $6,000 worth of payments? Right, that's more of that.
Speaker 1:It's that but it's also depending on, like, the people that you're working with. Like hey man, I need to make sure that those windows get ordered or that plumbing stuff gets ordered, because I don't want the client's money sitting in the account. I don't want to make a mistake, and the longer the money sits in there, the more likely it is I'm going to make a mistake.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the longer that money is sitting in there. I think something that we've done really well, that other contractors do bad is Don't mince words. I think when I see guys coming in in the coaching side, the mindset there is how much money can I invoice? Like how many line items can I invoice? And I want to. I want to get as much money into my bank account from the customer as possible, and what you do really well is what line items can I spend money on that I need to collect money on today so I can tell the customer hey, I want to go ahead and order the cabinets. I need a 50% material deposit to get those ordered. So I'm going to go and send you an invoice for 50% of them today to where we line item by line item saying what is, what do I need to spend? Therefore, I'm going to invoice that. Yeah, I want.
Speaker 1:I don't get me wrong, I want the money. I want the money that's mine, like I want the profit that's mine. I don't want to send more because I don't want the liability.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want. I want to send the $20,000 material invoice, but I also want to spend the 15 K at home Depot. So so, as quickly as possible, there's 5,000 sent to my account that I can do whatever I want with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like, where am I going to keep the little note? Hey, you just got sticky notes everywhere, right? 3000 of the money that's in your account has to go to you know, peter, and 2000 is going to you know chairs. Like, don't set yourself up to be in a position where your sticky notes are what is helping you manage your finance.
Speaker 2:That's really number when I look at companies that get in hot water and go under. Number one is financial management. Number two is bad hires. Under number one is financial management. Number two is bad hires, but the financial management side is what you just said. I got that $20,000 check for for the materials. How long I got some other bills to pay. I don't have to order that material today, I'll figure that out in two weeks. And so that 20 K all of a sudden gets whittled down to $8,000 that are sitting there and I got a $15,000 material order that I got to put for the wood for this job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's head in the sand. Don't not having the hard conversation now and like hoping just rolling the dice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, An optimistic contractor really gets in in a lot of hot water this way.
Speaker 2:Cause it's like oh yeah, that job, that person's going to pay. Well, then water this way because like, oh yeah, that job, that person's gonna pay, well, then they didn't pay. Now I'm lying to the first customer why the material didn't get ordered now and it's this kind of domino effect. What a tangled web. We, we and it happens almost 100 of the time, with contractors that are coming in that sit down like sort of unwind and it's not on purpose, and then it becomes like they're a liar, they don't't answer calls, they're not responding and it's affecting who they are as the reputation to the customers and it confirms people's worst fears about our industry.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, which is the sad thing, because then it affects everybody around you, even your competition. Yeah, it affects everybody trying to get into this industry. Yeah, and it's something that, if that's how you do it and you're successful doing it that way, power to you. Yeah, I've never seen it be successful long term no it does.
Speaker 2:It shows successful as you're growing as a company. So if I go from one customer to two customers, to four customers, to eight customers, to 12, that style of work, because I always have more deposits going in as soon as I go from 12 customers back to eight, all of a sudden I don't have the next customer paying me to cover the 12 jobs that are open because I only have eight new customers coming in. Yeah, so it works. There was a company that we did, for I coached for probably three years. I call it no more Peters, only Pauls, yes, but for them they showed a year and a half of like killer growth and when I started going in on a job level, they were breaking, even, if not losing money, but they were growing, they had really good marketing and they had a really big team. And they got to a spot that they were all of a sudden where did all our money go? Well, you dipped a little bit in revenue, you stopped growing and so you couldn't rob Peter anymore because there was no Peters coming in. There was less Peters than Pauls, and so I had no other jobs to rob and all of a sudden, all 17 of these open jobs I don't have money to complete and so it works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't you're practically going under. So I think that's a huge thing.
Speaker 2:On the on the weekly money management, I think when I'm looking bigger picture, I think there's. So we've got a weekly GM tracker that that we've used, that we that I give out the guys. That is tracking the money, like we're talking about what's in, what's out, what's happening this week, what bills have to be paid this week Very a basic spreadsheet that we had our office manager filling out that says what's being paid. When, on the bigger picture, I want to be looking monthly at the previous month. I want to go a week or two into the next month and looking at the previous month. What do we do? How do we do? What are the numbers? And sometimes in construction that's hard to do. Sometimes you have to look at the last three to four months because you can send out $80,000 of invoices the last day of the month and then spend it all the first of the next month. So the numbers look bad.
Speaker 1:So you kind of have to look at it as a whole, and then also you get into like and this is a little bit of a rabbit trail, but sometimes, like you're in a dry season where there's not a lot of work going on, or things are like pushing and it's something you don't really have control over, but you, you're like I'm going to be diligent about keeping my numbers. It's like every week that I look at this, the numbers keep pushing back, pushing back. What's happening? What's happening? I need to figure out what's wrong. I need to figure. Sometimes there's nothing wrong. It's just that client has an extra, their lender is dragging, dragging, or the they literally can't get the house closed on, and that's part of the.
Speaker 1:You know, getting started on your project is dependent on that. Sometimes that happens, and so that's why you know again, another rabbit trail. That's why continuously marketing, like you just always need to be trying to get work in, obviously, but sometimes it's not. And if you're not looking at it, uh, you, you can. You can get too dogmatic with trying to track things and forget that there's always these outside variables, uh, that are like okay, there's nothing I can do about that. I need to be okay, like that's what it is, yeah, and that's information.
Speaker 2:Don't bank on what's not in the bank account, like, don't be, like, well, it's going to happen and that will feel like, yeah, I'm going to be pessimistic. Take it at face value, not even pessimistic.
Speaker 1:Take it at face value. And it's just information. All it is is information. And now you have to make a decision with it, don't say sky is falling because you're going to be trying to land stuff out of desperation. That's when people drop their prices less profit just to get the revenue in, and I don't know if that has ever been successful long term either.
Speaker 2:No, it hasn't. If you're ending this podcast, if there was one thing. I'll handle it from here. We'll appreciate it now. If there's one thing for listeners podcast one thing you can do financially today to get yourself moving in the right direction, what would you suggest? What one thing if someone's trying to figure out how to own their finances?
Speaker 1:Wow, Well, that's a hell of a question, Clark, especially for a non-finance guy.
Speaker 2:That's true. I'll say this though Let me get this Go ahead please.
Speaker 1:Whatever your understanding is of your finances whether you are, you know I'm pretty literate or I'm just like I have them.
Speaker 1:This is, I'm just getting started you get the next level of education Understand your stuff at the most base level that you can understand it. Yeah, because when you all of the friction and all of the frustration for me comes from of the friction and all the frustration for me comes from I don't know how to do this and the pressure coming from the outside is telling me like you've got to figure this out right now and that's not necessarily humanly possible. You need to understand and grasp certain aspects of it. So breaking it down like what's my revenue, what's my profit, what's my net profit, is a great way to start, and I think most people would be surprised at how well they can understand that. And if you can't, you could YouTube help me understand revenue, gross profit, net profit. For dummies, you can find something that you know. Take an hour, take two hours out of your day and say that's all I'm doing today is just trying to understand it. Don't even use your numbers, just understand it in a theoretical world.
Speaker 2:Yes, how to look at finances as a company. I think my answer to that too is and this is not to be self-promoting, but getting on a software like ProStrux 360 or something that's tracking dollars in dollars out what's labor, what's materials, how much am I spending on jobs to where I think most guys that I see they're you know yellow pad, excel spreadsheets. I put 35 profit on here and then they never know what they actually end at. It's just like I I started here and I hope that it works out. And so getting on on a software like ProStruck 360 to say this is how I pay, I'm going to pay out this way, that way it tracks it, I'm going to buy materials and tie them to jobs. Then I know exactly how much I spend on every job and I can assess those numbers. If I'm invoicing that way and I'm paying that way. All of that data is being captured in the background in the software and it's getting pushed to QuickBooks. All of that data is being captured in the background in the software and it's getting pushed to QuickBooks.
Speaker 2:Maybe you don't have time to start itemizing overhead expenses. That's fine. How much are you spending on average on over? That's all I need to know. I don't need to know what's a subscription, what's insurance. We'll get there. We'll get to the itemizing of all that stuff All I need money in how much am I invoicing and of that can I tie per job? How much am I invoicing and of that can I tie per job? How much am I spending on labor and all materials? If you start there, I can help you assess that. The numbers we can start diving in. Start really shining up your QuickBooks and making it perfect, but at least capture where your dollars are going. At least know where you're spending and that way we have the data to start looking and assessing. Are your profit too low? Are you not charging enough? Do you need more revenue? Do you need to hire someone? All of those decisions are based on the numbers on the screen, not on what feels good today. So that's where I'd start.
Speaker 1:Well, I didn't ask, but that's true. You asked me that question.
Speaker 2:All right, y'all. Thanks so much for listening and we will talk to you next week, next week, next week, next week bye.