Why Am I Busy All the Time but Still Not Making Enough Money?

For installers

If you've been installing kitchens or bathrooms for any length of time, there's a good chance you've measured how well things are going by how busy you are.

The phone is ringing, customers are recommending you, the diary is full and people are prepared to wait. From the outside, that's what a successful installation business looks like, and to a point it absolutely is. The difficulty comes when you're working flat out, booked months ahead and still wondering why there never seems to be quite enough money left at the end of it.

I've seen this a lot over the years, and I've lived versions of it myself. One job rolls straight into the next, you're fitting during the day and pricing at night, dealing with suppliers, arranging subbies, answering messages and sorting the inevitable problems that come with installation. You're certainly not short of work, but because you're so busy doing the work, you rarely stop long enough to look properly at what the work is actually leaving behind.

That's where being busy can become quite deceptive.

A full diary doesn't automatically mean a profitable business

If you charge £8,000 for an installation, you haven't earned £8,000. Some of that money may belong to the electrician, plumber or plasterer. There may be materials, waste, parking, fuel and other direct costs, and the business still has vans, tools, insurance, phones, software, accountancy and everything else it needs to operate.

Then there is your own time.

One of the easiest mistakes for a self-employed installer to make is to treat whatever is left over as both their wage and the business profit. It isn't really the same thing. If you had to replace yourself with another experienced fitter, that person would need paying properly for doing the work. The business should then still be capable of covering its overheads and leaving something behind for taking the risk of running it.

If the business only looks profitable because you're working 50 or 60 hours a week and never properly costing your own time, you're effectively subsidising it with yourself.

That can carry on for years because the bank account keeps moving, bills get paid and there's always another job coming in. None of that necessarily tells you whether the business is making the money it should.

You probably have fewer chargeable days than you think

This is one of the big ones for trades businesses.

It's very easy to think in terms of five working days a week, but you can't normally sell all five of them, every week, all year. There are surveys, quotations, collecting materials, damaged products, return visits, customer meetings, paperwork, holidays, sickness, gaps between jobs and all the other things that take time without appearing as a neat chargeable day on an invoice.

Those days still have to be paid for somewhere.

If you're basing your prices on the idea that you can sell 230 or 240 days a year, but once everything is taken into account you're really selling 170 or 180, the days you do charge for have a lot more work to do.

That's one of the reasons I've never liked the idea of simply asking another fitter what their day rate is and copying it. You don't know their numbers, their overheads, how much non-chargeable time they carry or what they're actually trying to take out of the business.

Your price has to work for your business.

Good installers can be particularly bad at counting all their time

Most good installers care about the finished job. Something isn't quite right, so you stay another hour and sort it. A replacement door arrives a week later, so you stop in and fit it. A customer calls with a small issue and you go back because you don't want to leave them with a problem.

I wouldn't tell anybody to stop doing those things. That's part of how good reputations are built.

The problem is when you price every installation as though none of it will ever happen.

The odd extra hour doesn't feel like much, and neither does the occasional return visit, but multiply it across 30, 40 or 50 jobs and it becomes a sizeable amount of unpaid time. Add parking, fuel, travelling, ordering products, dealing with damaged items and the countless little things that happen around the actual fitting, and suddenly the job that looked healthy on paper doesn't look quite as good.

No single job normally causes the problem. It's the repetition across the year.

Sometimes the answer really is that you're too cheap

We can make pricing complicated when sometimes the answer is fairly simple.

Your prices may just have fallen behind.

A lot of installers don't consciously build their price from the business backwards. They start with what they used to charge, see what other local fitters are charging, add a little every now and then and carry on.

Meanwhile vans, fuel, insurance, materials and subbies all cost more. Customers expect more communication, more paperwork and a more professional service, and the cost of running the business keeps moving even when your prices don't.

The strange thing is that a full diary can hide this problem particularly well. If people keep saying yes and you're booked months ahead, there doesn't appear to be anything wrong.

I'm not suggesting that being busy automatically means you should put your prices up. But if you're working at capacity and still not making enough money, pricing has to be one of the first things you look at.

Not all busy work is good work

Another useful exercise is to stop treating every full day in the diary as equal.

One installation might be close to home, well designed, properly surveyed and straightforward to run. The customer is good to deal with, the products arrive and the job leaves you a healthy margin.

Another might involve awkward access, constant product problems, five extra visits, several other trades and endless calls while leaving very little money behind.

Both make you look equally busy.

They are not equally good jobs.

Once you start looking at jobs properly, patterns tend to appear. Maybe certain types of work need charging differently. Maybe one source of work consistently creates poor-margin jobs. Maybe you're doing something because you've always done it, not because it still makes commercial sense.

That's a much more useful question than simply asking how to get more enquiries.

Getting faster shouldn't mean earning less

There is another odd habit in the trades where experience can end up working against you.

When you first start, something takes ten days. Ten years later, with better tools and a lot more experience, you can produce the same standard in eight.

That doesn't automatically mean the value of the job has fallen by 20%.

Part of what the customer is paying for is all the experience that allows you to work efficiently, spot problems early and get the result without learning on their project.

If becoming better and faster only means you charge less, the only person who doesn't benefit from your experience is you.

Sometimes the business has simply become too dependent on you

There is another version of the busy-but-not-making-enough problem that isn't purely about price.

You can be making reasonable money and still have built a business where every extra pound depends on you personally doing more.

You fit during the day, price work at night, organise the trades, deal with customers and solve every problem. If you slow down, the income slows down. If you take a holiday, the work doesn't disappear; it just waits for you to come back.

Most installers don't deliberately build a business like this. It just happens. You're good at the work, people recommend you and one job leads to another. For years it can work perfectly well, and because the bills are being paid there doesn't seem to be much reason to change it.

Eventually, though, you can reach the point where you realise that working harder isn't really a route anywhere. Your diary is already full, your body is doing as much as you want it to do and there aren't any more hours available.

At that stage the question has to change from “How can I get busier?” to “How can this business work better?”

Start by finding out what is actually happening

I wouldn't try to rebuild everything in one go.

Start with some basic numbers.

How many jobs do you really complete in a year? What's the average job worth? What do the direct costs look like? What are the annual overheads? How many days can you genuinely charge customers for, once all the other work involved in running the business is taken into account?

Then ask the most important question: after all of that, what is the business actually leaving you?

You don't need to become an accountant, and the numbers don't have to be perfect on day one. They just need to be more useful than looking at the bank balance and hoping it feels about right.

Once you've got that picture, you can start seeing where the problem sits. It may be pricing. It may be poor-margin work. It may be too much unpaid time, too many return visits or simply trying to do every part of the business yourself.

Usually it's a mixture rather than one dramatic thing.

And sometimes the most profitable thing you can do is actually become a little less busy. If you can improve what each job leaves behind enough to complete 40 installations instead of 45 and earn the same or more money, you've created five jobs' worth of time without taking a pay cut.

That feels like progress to me.

Start with the Profit Planner

If any of this feels familiar, the Every Install Profit Planner is included with Free membership.

It lets you put some simple numbers around jobs completed, average job value, gross profit, overheads and what you want the business to produce. The point isn't to turn you into an accountant. It's to help you stop guessing.

Join Every Install free and use the Profit Planner →

If the numbers suggest your pricing has fallen behind, Raising Your Prices is also one of the free Every Install Quick Wins.

Use the Raising Your Prices Quick Win →

If you need help working through the wider business, you can work directly with me through KBB Momentum.