The $250,000 Revenue Breakdown · Handyman Business Academy

The $250,000 Revenue Breakdown

Most people in this trade say things like “I want to do $250,000 this year” and then they just kind of hope it happens. The problem is revenue is a lagging indicator. By the time you realize you’re off, it’s already too late to fix it. If you want real control over your business, you can’t think in terms of yearly goals. You have to think in weekly actions.

Revenue only comes from three things. How many estimates you run, how many of those estimates you close, and how much the average job is worth. That’s it. Everything else is noise.

Total Estimates (booking rate from call, to scheduled in person estimate)
Conversion Ratio
Average Ticket

The reason weekly goals matter is because they turn a big scary revenue number into things you can actually control. You can control how many calls you answer, how many estimates you run, how you sell, and how you price. You can’t control what the total revenue number says at the end of the month.

To build weekly goals, you have to work backwards from the revenue number instead of forward. I’ll use round numbers so this makes sense.

Let’s say the goal is $250,000 for the year and your average ticket is $1,400. The first thing you do is divide $250,000 by $1,400. That tells you how many jobs you actually need to sell in a year. In this case, it comes out to about 179 jobs.

Next, you look at your conversion ratio. If you close 50% of the estimates you run, that means you need double the number of estimates to sell those 179 jobs. So you divide 179 by .50, which means you need to run about 358 in-person estimates over the year.

Now you look at your booking rate. If 70% of inbound calls actually book an estimate, you take those 358 estimates and divide by .70. That tells you that you need about 512 inbound calls over the course of the year to stay on pace.

Once you have those three numbers, the rest is easy. You divide everything by 12 to get your monthly targets and then divide by 4 to get your weekly targets. When you do that math, you end up needing roughly 11 inbound calls per week, 7 to 8 estimates per week, and about 4 sold jobs per week to stay on track for $250,000.

Now here’s the part most people miss. The goal is not to obsess over the $250,000 number anymore. The only thing that matters week to week is whether or not you hit those activity numbers. If revenue is down, one of those numbers broke. Either you didn’t get enough calls, you didn’t book enough estimates, you didn’t close well enough, or your average ticket dropped.

This is how you stop being reactive. Instead of getting to the end of the month and wondering what went wrong, you know by Thursday whether you’re on pace or not. And if you’re off, you know exactly what lever to pull, whether it be increasing your lead, spend to get more calls, performing home health inspections to increase your average ticket, or refining your sales process to increase your conversion ratio. The beautiful part is often times only one lever is off, which makes it much easier to get back on track. The cost of not doing this is the cost of assuming something is broken when it’s not you could think your conversion is down or your average ticket is low or you’re not getting enough business but if you’re not tracking it, those are emotional decisions not data driven.

Most guys don’t struggle because they’re bad at the trade. They struggle because their goals are too vague to execute. When the numbers are this clear, the only thing left is execution.

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