The Owner Thought Small Jobs Were the Best Fit. The Data Said Otherwise.
A Montana paving company was taking every job that came in — small patches, parking lots, mill-and-overlay, new construction. The owner assumed small jobs were easy and profitable. We built the tools to find out. He was wrong.
$2K–$3K
Small patch jobs revealed as lowest margin
$20K–$50K
Larger driveways — true profitability sweet spot
2
Custom operational tools built
Weekly
Planning cadence (was day-of)
The Challenge
The owner was drawn to small jobs — $2,000 to $3,000 driveways and patches. His reasoning made sense on the surface: "It only takes us half a day." Quick in, quick out, move to the next one.
The problem was that the paving itself might take half a day — but mobilizing all the equipment to the site, completing the work, and then pulling everything back out took a full day at minimum. For a $2,500 job, that's a full day's crew and equipment cost for very little revenue.
Every morning, the owner and crew would show up and decide what they were doing that day. No advance planning, no crew optimization, no equipment sequencing. Just instinct and whatever was most urgent. Job-level profitability measurement was nonexistent. No tools to track true cost per job — labor, equipment mobilization, and time were all lumped together, making it impossible to know which jobs actually made money.
Our Approach
We didn't just clean up the books. We built two operational tools that the owner uses every day — one to evaluate jobs before taking them, and one to plan the week before it starts.
The first tool: a custom calculator that takes a job's square footage, type, material costs, estimated crew hours, equipment hours, and mobilization distance — and outputs the real margin, profit per crew hour, and a recommendation on whether the job fits the company's profile. The key insight: mobilization cost was being dramatically underestimated on small jobs. A 500 sq ft patch job 20 miles away had nearly the same mobilization cost as a 10,000 sq ft mill-and-overlay — but a fraction of the revenue.
The second tool: a structured weekly planning tool that sequences jobs by crew availability, equipment requirements, geographic proximity (to minimize mobilization), and weather windows. The owner now plans the full week on Monday morning instead of deciding each day. Fewer wasted mobilization trips, better crew utilization, and the ability to batch nearby jobs together. The scheduling tool also flags when the week is over-committed — before it becomes a problem on the job site.
The Outcome
The paving company did not need more revenue. It needed to understand which revenue was worth pursuing. Job-level costing revealed that the work mix the owner had always assumed was most profitable was actually the opposite — and that insight changed how the business bid, scheduled, and grew.
Fewer wasted mobilization trips, better crew utilization, and the ability to plan a full week in advance are operational improvements that don't show up on a single line of the income statement. But they compound — and they are the kind of change that makes a business more valuable over time.
Services involved
Industries
Selected client result. Details adapted for confidentiality.
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