My Business On Purpose

Hey, we say all the time that for contractors, the tools of your trade are not hammers, nails, levels, all of that. The tools of your trade—especially in project management—are calculators, calendars, subdivided bank accounts, and spreadsheets. And so I wanted to dive into that today. There are a lot of contractors trying to figure out job to job. They can look at the end of the year at their P&L, and as long as they see a number on the bottom line, they go, "Well, I must be making money." Then they look at their bank account and say, "Well, there's money in there, so I must be making money." But the reality is, money's always in motion, right? So we don't really know if we're making money unless we do something in the contractor space called job costing. And you can do this fundamentally anywhere. If you're a retail outlet, you can do inventory costs and actually look at the margins made on products. Because what you don't want to do in business—you're going to have cash flow. There’s going to be either