BTHE BARATELLI INSTITUTE · Mentoring at Scale
FOR HVAC · PLUMBING · ELECTRICAL · LANDSCAPING · PEST · ROOFING · CLEANING

Drive time and callbacks kill home-services margin.

Most home-services owners track revenue and call it a day. The numbers that actually drive profit are technician utilization, drive time, callback rate, and member-program LTV — and they're rarely on a single page. This tool puts them on one page.

9
Operating metrics
$/Job
Per-ticket profit
Util %
Tech utilization
LTV
Member program
YOUR BUSINESS
1
Business profile
2
Per-job economics
3
Cost structure
4
Member program
5
Job-economics scorecard
STAGE 1 OF 5

Tell me about your business

Defaults are typical for a 4-truck residential HVAC company.

Total billed revenue this year, excluding sales tax. Top-quartile residential HVAC at this size: $1.5-2.5M / truck.
$
Field-billable technicians (not dispatchers, not admin, not the owner unless they're billing in the field).
Average one-way distance from base to customer. Drives "drive time" — the biggest hidden cost in home services.
Total billable jobs per year. For HVAC, includes service calls + maintenance. Excludes long-form installs.
STAGE 2 OF 5

Per-job economics

The five drivers that decide whether a job is profitable, regardless of revenue.

Total billed per job, including dispatch fee, labor, parts, and any upsells. Median residential HVAC: $400-600. Plumbing: $300-500. Electrical: $400-650.
$
True cost of parts on average job (not retail to customer). Typical: 18-30% of ticket for HVAC, 25-35% for plumbing, 15-25% for landscaping.
$
Time wrenches are turning. Doesn't include drive time — that's separate below.
Round-trip time between jobs. Top performers: under 0.5 hr/job (dense routing). Typical: 0.7-1.0. Stressed routes: 1.2+.
Of all jobs, % that the tech has to return to fix something. Top performers: 2-3%. Industry typical: 4-6%. Operational red flag: 8%+.
%
% of jobs that result in additional services or accessory sales. Top-trained teams: 35-50%. Untrained: 5-15%. Drives margin without adding drive time.
%
The drive-time tax. Every hour of drive time is paid labor that produces zero revenue. A 4-tech business with 0.85 hr/job average drive time is paying ~$140K/year for techs to sit in trucks. Cutting drive time by 0.2 hours per job (better dispatch software, geographic clustering, density) is often worth $25-40K of recovered margin.
STAGE 3 OF 5

Cost structure

Where the money goes — and which costs scale with growth vs. which are fixed.

Wage + employer FICA + benefits + workers comp + paid time off, divided by total paid hours. HVAC techs $32-55/hr loaded; plumbing $35-55; electrical $38-58.
$
Lease/depreciation + fuel + maintenance + insurance + GPS + parts inventory float. Typical service truck: $14-20K/year all-in.
$
CSRs/dispatchers, phone system, dispatch software (ServiceTitan/Housecall Pro/Jobber), office space, utilities, supplies.
$
Digital ads (Google LSA, paid search, Facebook), SEO, direct mail, truck wraps, yard signs, lead-buying (Angi, HomeAdvisor). Typical: 5-10% of revenue.
$
General liability, workers comp (often huge for trades), licensing, accounting, legal, training/certification.
$
Reasonable comp + benefits for owner-operator(s). Profit-share is calculated separately.
$
STAGE 4 OF 5

Membership / service plan

Recurring service plans (HVAC maintenance plans, pest contracts, lawn-care subscriptions) are the highest-LTV asset most home-services businesses operate. The right structure can 2-3x business value at sale.

Customers on a recurring service plan or annual maintenance contract.
Annual recurring revenue per member. HVAC maintenance plans typically $180-300; pest contracts $300-600; lawn care $1,200-3,000.
$
% of members who renew each year. Top performers 88-92%; industry typical 78-85%; struggling programs below 70%.
%
Members generate 2-3x non-membership-fee revenue per year through repair calls, replacements, accessories. Top operators 2.8x; typical 2.0x; below 1.5x means the program isn't being worked.
Why a member program is worth a multiplier at sale. When a home-services business sells, buyers value recurring revenue at 1.5-2.5x EBITDA more than transactional revenue. A 1,000-member plan generating $250 / member / yr = $250K of recurring revenue is worth approximately $500-1,000K of additional enterprise value at exit beyond what the same revenue would be worth as one-off jobs. The multiplier compounds with retention rate.
STAGE 5 OF 5 · YOUR JOB-ECONOMICS SCORECARD

Scorecard

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Per-job profit breakdown

Where the workday goes (per technician)

The nine operating metrics

Benchmarks

Your numbers against typical residential home-services industry benchmarks (Service Roundtable, Nexstar, ACCA, ServiceTitan industry data).

Member program economics

Recommendations

PAIRS WITH
CFO & Controller's Guide · Liquidity Event Playbook
The CFO Guide covers home-services KPI dashboards, dispatch-software ROI, technician pay-plan design, and the home-services M&A landscape (private equity has been rolling up HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and pest at premium multiples since 2020). The Liquidity Event Playbook has the exit-prep chapter for owner-operators considering a sale. Subscribe to the library →
CFO & CONTROLLER'S GUIDE

The full home-services KPI playbook — by email.

Dispatch-software ROI evaluation, technician pay-plan design, member-program design, drive-time optimization, recurring-revenue exit positioning, and the home-services PE roll-up landscape.

We use your email only to send what you requested and occasional Institute updates — never sold, unsubscribe anytime. See our Privacy Policy.

Benchmark ranges shown are illustrative typical-range values for residential home-services businesses based on industry surveys (Service Roundtable, Nexstar Network, ACCA, Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors, ServiceTitan benchmarking data). Your actual numbers vary by region, service mix, ticket type, and operating maturity — these are conceptual references, not your specific peer data. The per-job profitability calculation assumes a single allocation method (proportional-to-time); other methods (revenue-weighted, complexity-adjusted) produce different per-job profitability. This is not financial, tax, or operational advice.
WANT THE METHODOLOGY BEHIND THIS TOOL?
This calculator is one chapter of CFO & Controller's Reference Guide.
The tool gives you the answer. The guide gives you the argument — the case law, the worked examples, the negotiation playbook, the cross-check tables, the exception cases. Read the chapter and you can defend your number to a board, a buyer, an examiner, or a counterparty.
The methodology behind this calculator is in Ch 28 KPI Dashboards of the reference guide.
See the Guide → Browse all 22 guides
PROFESSIONAL DISCLAIMER · PLEASE READ

Educational and informational purposes only. This calculator and any output it produces are intended solely for general educational and decision-support purposes. They do not constitute investment, tax, legal, accounting, appraisal, lending, insurance, or any other professional advice, and they do not create a fiduciary, attorney-client, accountant-client, or advisor-client relationship of any kind.

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