By the late 90s I was one of the busiest metal building erectors in South Florida, and I want to tell you what that was actually worth.
I was a young operator building a clientele that seemed to appreciate me greatly. Work poured in. I took jobs at what the customers told me they were worth — they’d name the number, I’d nod, and my guys would go build it. And even back then I kept my records. Hours, jobs, costs. I tracked everything and used it for nothing. It just accumulated, like the work did.
Busy. Very busy. The business grew out of my control and took over my life. At its peak I had over a hundred crewmen in the field — and all that motion was providing me with little or nothing I couldn’t have gotten from a 9-to-5. Worse than nothing, really, because a 9-to-5 doesn’t follow you home. The stress pushed me and my family to nearly the breaking point.
Here’s the part that took me years to see: I wasn’t running a company. I was running a crew service, priced by my customers, for my customers. They appreciated me greatly — of course they did. I was excellent, and I was cheap.
The night the numbers talked
It came to a climax. I finally sat down with all those records I’d been keeping for years and did what I’d never done: I built my own estimate for every job and set it next to what I’d actually been paid. Actual against projected, job after job after job.
The data said what the exhaustion had been saying all along. The busiest guy in town was working for little or no margin, and volume was just multiplying the problem.
I changed my strategy overnight. Not over a season — overnight. No more accepting what my customers said a job was worth. I worked up my number from my own history, and that number was the number.
My price was my price.
The scary part
My clientele did not appreciate the new arrangement at all. The bulk of my customers turned immediately to cheaper alternatives, and I won’t dress it up: it was scary. When you’ve spent a decade being the busy guy, watching the phone go quiet feels like dying.
But here’s what I could finally see with the numbers in front of me: losing that work wasn’t losing money. Most of it had never really been paying me in the first place.
I trimmed my crew from over a hundred down to the best of the hundred — the hand-picked core. And the jobs I did close at my price meant I finally had the resources to do the work right and take control of my own destiny. Fewer jobs, right-priced, built by the best crew I’d ever fielded.
Within a few months, the turnaround was complete. I was fishing in the Keys while the business worked for me. Not a different decade — a few months. Same trade, same market, same me. The only thing that changed was who set the price, and I only had the nerve to change it because the numbers gave it to me.
That decision saved my company. CMBSC would eventually have crashed and burned had I not woken up. It’s the full-on life lesson I never forgot, and the core of that crew is still with me today, through thick and thin.
What I’d tell the busy guy
If you’re slammed with work and somehow never ahead, I don’t have to guess how that’s happening. Somebody else is pricing your jobs — and they’re doing it with their interests in mind, not yours.
You can’t hold your line on a feeling. A feeling folds the first time the phone goes quiet. What holds is history: your actual costs, your actual hours, job after job, sitting in front of you when you name the number. I kept those records for years before I had the sense to look at them. The looking is what changed my life.
That’s why YEStimator works the way it does. An estimate for every job, actual against projected, every outcome kept — so your price comes from your own history, and you’ve got the ground to stand on when you hold it.
Your price is your price. Mine’s been mine since 2003.
— Dean Davids, Tailgate Technology