What a Day Costs

Every owner can tell you what a job sold for. Far fewer can tell you what the day cost.

We spent one Tuesday with a six-truck service company and tracked every hour, every part, every mile and every phone call from the first dispatch to the last invoice. Nothing was staged. The schedule was the schedule.

What the day showed was not dramatic. It was arithmetic. Two callbacks erased the margin on four clean jobs. Fifty-one minutes of windshield time between two calls that were nine miles apart. A part that was in stock in the wrong truck.

None of that shows up in a sales report. All of it shows up in the bank account at the end of the month.

The owner's conclusion after reading the numbers back: "We do not have a pricing problem. We have a Tuesday problem."