Fox Business Advisors

Website

Fox Business Advisors I help owner-operators in the Arkansas service trades solve the problems that keep their business from working as hard as they do.

Pricing, scheduling, how work moves from prospect to paid invoice. I build the fix with you, then hand you the controls.

10/16/2026

Good morning, and happy Friday. Have you checked your KPIs this week?

Most of the numbers I put up on a Friday come off a financial statement, because that’s where you find out where a business actually is. This one doesn’t. But it ends up on the statement anyway, which is the point.

What percentage of your extra work actually gets written up?

Not the big change orders — those get handled. I mean the two hours somebody added on Tuesday because the customer asked, and it was easier to just do it than to stop and have the conversation.

Call it $300 in time and material. Say it happens on one job in four. If you run 200 jobs a year, that’s 50 times. $15,000.

Nobody stole that. Nobody made a mistake. Every one of those was somebody on your crew trying to keep a customer happy, which is mostly what you want them doing.

But that’s not a money problem. It’s an approval problem.

The crew doesn’t know what they’re allowed to say yes to, so they say yes to everything. And the only person who could have set that rule is you.

A management target I like: write down the dollar figure a lead can approve on his own, and what he does before starting anything above it. One sentence. Then tell the crew.

How many change orders did your crew do for free this week?

10/14/2026

Something I’ve been getting asked more lately: how many of these can you take on?

The honest answer is not very many at a time.

I’m one person. A fractional client is a real chunk of my week, every week — calls, work between calls, actually building the thing instead of handing over a report. There’s a hard number where I stop being useful to anybody, and it’s low.

I used to think I should hide that. It sounds like a weakness when everybody else is talking about growth.

I’ve come around on it. If I take on more than I can do right, the person who pays for that is the owner who hired me to fix something and got a consultant who was too busy to look closely.

So I’d rather be clear up front. I take a few at a time. When I’m full, I’ll tell you I’m full and when that changes.

That’s not a sales tactic. It’s just the shape of the work.

10/13/2026

I joined the chamber in Hot Springs last week.

The part I didn’t expect was the phone ringing the same day. John Duncan, their business development director, calling to find out what I actually do.

Then he asked something I’ve been thinking about since.

“Who do I tell about you?”

I’d been a member for a few hours. He had no reason to ask that yet.

He’d invited me to a coffee meeting I couldn’t make, so he opened his door right after it instead. We sat for 45 minutes. Most of it was him asking questions about my business and my story.

I said on Monday that I’m not going to build this business with ads and that it would come from people talking to each other. This is what that looks like when it’s actually working. Somebody who didn’t know me two weeks ago, trying to work out who he can introduce me to.

If you’re around Hot Springs and you’ve wondered whether the chamber is worth it, my read after a week is that it is, if you show up. John will see to that.

Thanks, John. Look forward to working with you.

10/12/2026

Last week I spent a day driving around Hot Springs talking to people.

Supply houses mostly — plumbing, HVAC, electrical. Walked in, introduced myself, asked what they were seeing. A chamber meeting in the middle of it.

I didn’t sell anything. That wasn’t really the point.

Here’s something I’ve had to admit to myself this year. I’m not a salesman. I’m not going to talk anybody into anything, and I’d be bad at it if I tried.

What I’m actually good at is sitting down with somebody and working through a problem until it makes sense. That’s the job. It turns out it’s also how I get the job.

Every client I have came from a conversation. Somebody talked to me, or somebody told somebody about me.

So I’m going to do more of that and less of everything else.

If you run a service business around here and something about it isn’t working the way it should, I’d like to hear about it. No pitch. I’m easy to find.

Good morning, and happy Friday. Have you checked your KPIs this week?This week was about what a bigger year actually cos...
10/09/2026

Good morning, and happy Friday. Have you checked your KPIs this week?

This week was about what a bigger year actually costs. The KPI that closes it: labor efficiency.

We've covered what it is — revenue per available labor hour, and whether the hours your crew puts in are turning into the work you billed.

This week I want to use it for something else: finding where your ceiling actually sits.

Say you run five guys in the field. That's about 173 hours each a month — forty hours times fifty-two weeks, divided by twelve. So 867 hours of paid crew time.

Worth being precise about that: those are hours you pay for, not hours on a job. Take out PTO, holidays, weather, travel and shop time and what a guy is actually available for is closer to 140 or 150. I'm using paid hours here because every owner can pull that number off a payroll report without doing any work first.

On a $95,000 month, 867 paid hours is $110 of revenue per hour.

Now somebody offers you a $130,000 month. At the same rate, that's 1,186 hours. You're 319 short — about two more people.

That's the number everybody runs. Can I staff it.

Here's the other one. $130,000 of work carries $91,000 in cost, against $66,500 today. You'd need $24,500 more cash in front of the month, before anybody pays you.

Two ceilings. Crew and cash. The one that stops you is whichever runs out first, and it isn't always the one being watched.

A management target I like is checking both before saying yes to a bigger month. Hiring is the visible constraint. Funding is the quiet one.

Which of your two ceilings is closer right now?

10/08/2026

When an owner tells me he needs more work, I believe him. He knows his business better than I do.

But it's one of the few times I want to look at the numbers before I agree.

Because "I need more work" and "I can't carry the work I already have" feel identical from the inside. Both of them show up as a tight account and a stressful Friday.

They aren't the same problem and they don't have the same fix.

More work solves the first one. More work makes the second one worse.

That's the whole reason I start with a look instead of a plan. Not because the owner is wrong — usually he isn't — but because those two are impossible to tell apart from where he's standing, and obvious once there are numbers on them.

It costs nothing to find out which one you're in.

You know your break-even number.Fixed overhead plus the notes, divided by your gross margin. For a shop carrying $14,000...
10/07/2026

You know your break-even number.

Fixed overhead plus the notes, divided by your gross margin. For a shop carrying $14,000 of overhead and $2,900 in payments at a 30% margin, that's about $56,300 of revenue a month.

Hit it and you're even. That's what break-even means.

Except you have to buy the month before you sell it.

That $56,300 of revenue carries about $39,400 of cost — materials, payroll, subs. All of it leaves your account before the customer's money shows up.

So the month your P&L calls a wash is a month you had to come up with $39,400 ahead of time.

Break-even is a revenue number. Payroll is a cash number. They measure two different things, and only one of them is what the bank sees on a Friday.

At a real $95,000 month it's $66,500 out the door before the first invoice gets paid. Bigger month, bigger float.

That's how a business can be profitable on paper and still feel like it's drowning. Nothing's wrong with the math. The two numbers just don't land on the same day.

Take your committed costs, divide by your gross margin, then multiply that answer by your cost percentage. The first number is what you have to earn. The second is what you have to front.

You want a bigger year. Another million in work, say.That's not a crazy goal. For a shop already doing a million-somethi...
10/06/2026

You want a bigger year. Another million in work, say.

That's not a crazy goal. For a shop already doing a million-something, it's the obvious next move.

Here's the part that catches people. The million pays you at the end. It bills you at the front.

Spread over a year, another million is about $83,300 of work a month.

At a 30% gross margin, 70 cents of every one of those dollars is cost — materials, labor, subs. That's $58,300 going out the door every month.

And you don't collect for a month and a half. Materials bought, crew paid, invoice sent, then you wait.

So at any point in that year you've got roughly $87,500 of your own money sitting out in the field.

Not spent. Out. Working, unpaid for, waiting to come back.

The million does earn $300,000 in margin. That part is real. But the $300,000 arrives across twelve months and the $87,500 goes out before the first job closes — and it stays out as long as the volume holds.

That's what I want an owner looking at before he says yes to a bigger year. Not to talk him out of it. Most of the time growth is the right call.

But it's a cash decision before it's a profit decision, and the two don't arrive on the same day.

If you took on another million in work starting next month, where would the first $87,500 come from?

10/06/2026

For twenty years I worked on the other side of this.

In a big company, when a team wanted to grow, they asked for money. There was a process. You built a case, somebody in finance ran it, and if it cleared, you got funded. The cash to grow came from somewhere else in the building.

I built a lot of those models. What I didn't appreciate at the time is how unusual that arrangement is.

An owner-operator doesn't have a finance team that fronts the money. When you take on more work, you fund it yourself — out of your own account, before anybody pays you for it. No committee, no budget line, and nobody telling you what it's going to cost in cash before you say yes.

That's the part I think gets skipped when people talk about growth like it's purely good news.

More work is a decision to put more of your own money out in front of you.

It can absolutely be the right call. It's just not a free one.

Good morning, and happy Friday. Have you checked your KPIs this week?This week was about what the business has to make f...
10/02/2026

Good morning, and happy Friday. Have you checked your KPIs this week?

This week was about what the business has to make for you. The KPI that closes it: gross margin.

We've covered what it is. This week I want to look at what it hides.

A blended gross margin is an average. And an average of two very different kinds of work tells you almost nothing about either one.

Say the shop did $95,000 last month at 30%. That's $28,500 in margin dollars.

Now split it by the kind of work.

$55,000 of it was service and repair. That work ran 42%, so it produced $23,100.

$40,000 was new construction. That ran 13.5%, so it produced $5,400.

Same $28,500. Same 30%. Two completely different businesses inside one number.

The 42% work is carrying the 13.5% work, and nothing on the P&L says so.

So the question isn't automatically "is 30% good." The better question is what the 30% is made of.

A management target I like is knowing margin by job type before knowing margin by month. The monthly number tells you what happened. The split tells you what to do about it.

If you had to put last month's revenue into two buckets — the work you'd take more of, and the work you take because it's there — do you know what each one actually made?

Address

Benton, AR
72019

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Fox Business Advisors posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category