Skilled trades CFO services: sell capacity, price the book, own the agreement base

CFO work for a shop that sells hours

Your bookkeeper records what the shop did last month; CFO work decides what it does next quarter. For a trades company that means a monthly cadence on top of clean books: revenue per technician per day, billable ratio, gross margin split between service and install work, agreement count and renewal rate, and a rolling cash and debt plan for the fleet. Fixed fees, quoted after a discovery call.

Owners usually call us at a decision point — a fourth van, a licensed tech asking for a raise, a builder dangling a new-construction contract, or a retiring competitor offering their customer list. The recurring dashboard exists so those moments get priced from your own data, not from optimism in a busy week.

Technician capacity math: the ceiling is hours, not demand

A shop's revenue ceiling is techs multiplied by working days multiplied by billable hours per day — and the last number is where most of the profit hides. A tech paid for eight hours might bill five once drive time, quoting, callbacks, and shop time take their share. Moving the billable ratio even modestly outperforms a price increase, because the cost side does not move with it: dispatch density, tighter service areas, and callback reduction are capacity projects, not marketing projects.

Apprentices raise capacity at a lower wage, but only inside supervision ratios and with a real training cost in year one; federal and provincial apprenticeship incentives offset part of it. Install crews run different math again — fewer, longer jobs, quoted margin, and material risk — which is why we track service and install as separate businesses sharing one fleet.

Pricing the flat-rate book from your own cost per billable hour

Most flat-rate books are inherited, copied, or bought — and the prices inside them quietly assume someone else's cost structure. We rebuild the price book from your fully loaded cost per billable hour, then set the profit target on purpose:

One trap we see constantly: healthy parts markup hiding underpriced labour. The book has to earn on both, because a labour-heavy diagnostic call cannot borrow margin from a parts-heavy repair.

Service agreements: the recurring revenue your slow months need

A maintenance or membership plan does three jobs at once: it books predictable revenue, it fills spring and fall shoulder weeks with scheduled tune-ups, and it makes you the first call when the equipment finally dies. The CFO discipline is pricing each plan so the included visits are covered at burdened cost, then tracking agreement count and renewal rate monthly like the assets they are. The cash arrives before the work, so the deferred-revenue mechanics on our skilled trades bookkeeping page matter here too.

Agreements also change what your company is worth. A buyer pays for revenue that repeats without a phone ringing — which is exactly what an agreement base is.

Buying a competitor's book: diligence before the handshake

Retiring owners sell customer lists and agreement bases every year, and the price should follow evidence: active agreements with renewal history, service-area density that fits your dispatch map, and how much of the revenue depends on the departing owner personally. Verify the terms you inherit — prepaid visits are a liability you assume on day one — and check customer concentration, because a book built on two builders is a different asset than five hundred households. We model the purchase against post-close cash flow, including some attrition when the familiar name disappears.

If your work touches US-made equipment, imported parts, or the occasional cross-border warranty job, the duty and tax side lives on our cross-border tax page for skilled trades.