Busy vs Profitable: A Mid-Year Check-Up for Fence Companies

Tony Thornton and StashGrade ran a mid-year webinar for fence company owners. It asked one question. Halfway through the year, is your fence company actually making money?

Tony Thornton has spent decades consulting for fence and specialty contractors. Mike Petroskey founded StashGrade after years in software and eight private-equity acquisitions of specialty contractors. This is the recap.

Busy is not the same as profitable

Revenue is up. Take-home is flat. That was the opening point.

One example from the webinar. Last year the company booked $1M in revenue and kept $180K. This year it booked $1.25M and kept $90K.

Revenue grew 25%. Profit fell by half. More fence, less money.

Here is what the books look like when this happens:

• The bank account never catches up.
• The owner is still funding payroll out of pocket.
• Nobody knows which jobs actually paid.
• Margin shrinks quietly all year.

Do you know your margin on your last 10 jobs?

Most owners can name their revenue. Fewer can name the profit on each of the last ten jobs.

The profit on each job, one at a time. That is the number that matters, and totals hide it.

Why a mid-year check beats a year-end one

Half the year is booked. Your pricing, crews, and overhead are already on the books and can be measured.

Half the year is still fixable. There is enough season left to reprice, re-crew, and cut what is bleeding, if you find it now.

Wait until December and it is history. By year-end you are not fixing the year. You are explaining it to your accountant.

How the top 10% define success

The most profitable fence companies are not the ones with the most trucks. They run on systems.

Most companies chase revenue. Bigger top line, thinner and thinner bottom. The top 10% build efficiency. Same crews, same trucks, more of it reaches the bottom line.

Three strategies from the webinar

1. Have a plan

The common mistake is no budget. The year runs on gut feel and last year’s habits.

Every product line gets lumped together. Nobody sees which work makes money and which quietly loses it.

The fix is a 12-month budget, tracked by product line, actual against budget, every month. You know your margin per segment before the job is sold.

Margin varies a lot by fence type. Here are the numbers Tony walked through:

The biggest revenue line, chain link, carried the thinnest margin. Winning more of it made the year worse.

2. Treat lead generation as a principle

When leads only come from referrals and whoever calls, the phone eventually goes quiet.

Then you take any job at any price to keep crews busy, and margin walks out the door.

A steady pipeline, aimed at the segments where demand is growing, lets you hold price and pick the profitable work.

3. Know your numbers

Know your true cost before you bid. It has three parts:

• Direct: labor and materials on the job.
• Indirect: what it costs to open the doors.
• Variable: what moves with your sales.

Add profit on top and you have your break-even, the point where the doors are paid for and profit starts.

Tony’s rule of thumb: winning 75 to 80% of your bids means your prices are too low. On his math, raising price 15 to 20% can nearly double take-home profit.

Where the money actually leaks

Four places the webinar pointed to:

• Pricing: bids built on last year’s numbers. The same fence, quoted at a margin that no longer exists.
• Labor: hours that never make it onto the job, drive time, rework, and crews that run slower than you think.
• Materials: supplier increases absorbed instead of passed on. Waste nobody counts because nobody measures it.
• Overhead: software, trucks, and payments that made sense at your old revenue and quietly outgrew it.

A 30-minute check you can run at your desk

Tony runs a version of this with every client. Four questions:

• Strengths: which job types do you win and profit on?
• Weaknesses: where do jobs go sideways? Which work do you dread seeing on the schedule?
• Opportunities: what could you charge properly for if you had the numbers to back it?
• Threats: what cost is climbing faster than your prices?

You cannot fix what you cannot see in your numbers.

The same check-up, automatically

The manual version takes real time. StashGrade runs the same check straight from your books.

• Connect: link QuickBooks in about two minutes. Nothing to upload, nothing to rebuild.
• Analyze: it reads your real invoices, costs, and P&L, the same records Tony asks for on a consult.
• See the leaks: job types running below margin, costs creeping, and overhead you have outgrown.

In the live demo it flagged a supplier invoice entered twice worth $3,680, a merchant-services fee up 24%, and fuel split across two vendors. Then it graded the business and forecast the year-end number.

Busy is not the goal. Profitable is.

StashGrade reads your QuickBooks and shows where your fence jobs make and lose money. Free to start, read-only, disconnect anytime. Connect QuickBooks for free.

StashGrade describes what your books show. It does not give financial, tax, or legal advice.