The job was profitable. It just happened twice.

Every line in your job costing report shows a margin, and the blended margin still disappoints. Salaried capacity is unusually good at hiding a second attempt.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for The job was profitable. It just happened twice.

There is a specific and common frustration in service businesses: job-level costing looks fine. Every project came in at or near its estimated hours. Utilisation is respectable. And yet the margin at the bottom of the P&L is several points below what the individual jobs imply it should be. The usual suspects get investigated first (discounting, overhead creep, a bad month in one team), and none of them fully account for the gap. A large part of that gap is often work that was done more than once. Not disasters.…

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