The Business of Contracting
The table almost no contractor has ever built
Published September 17, 2026
Ask a contractor doing $150,000 a month what his marketing costs and you get a number in about two seconds. Four thousand a month. Six. Whatever the card gets charged.
Ask him what one signed job costs him in each place the work comes from, and the room goes quiet.
That second number is the one that runs the business. Here is how to get it, channel by channel, with the part everybody skips at the end.
Referral
Your best channel. It also has a price, and the price is not zero.
Count what you actually spend to keep it running: the gift cards, the lunch for the realtor, the discount you gave the repeat customer because he sent you two neighbors. Divide by the jobs it produced last quarter. Most companies land somewhere under $200 a job, which is why referral work feels free.
Then write the honest note next to it. You cannot turn it up. When you need four more jobs in March, there is no lever on this channel. That is not a complaint about referrals, it is the reason the other rows exist.
Bought appointments
Take what you paid, divide by jobs signed, not by appointments delivered.
If you did that math after reading the last article, you already know the number is nothing like the invoice. Twenty appointments at $250 turn into three or four estimates that close, which puts a signed job somewhere between $1,400 and $2,000 once the homeowner has been shopping.
The note next to this row is short. It stops the day you stop paying.
Lead marketplaces
Around $50 a lead in most trades, closing at about 15%, which lands a signed job near $333 on paper.
On paper is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The same homeowner was sold to three or four of your competitors within the same minute, so the number that matters is not what you paid for the lead, it is what the price war did to your margin on the job you did win. Nobody puts that in a spreadsheet, and it is usually worse than the acquisition cost itself.
Your own channel
Diamond Blue Group spent $2,500 on ads in August and signed three projects worth $67,000, $33,000 and $32,000. That is $833 in ad cost per signed job.
The note on this row is the one that makes it different from every row above: the account is theirs, the CRM is theirs, and the homeowner called them by name. Turn the spend off for a month and the profile still ranks, the past customers still find you, and the campaigns start again from where they left off.
| Where the job came from | Cost per signed job | What happens if you switch it off |
|---|---|---|
| Referral | Under $200 | Nothing changes, and nothing grows |
| Bought appointments | $1,400 to $2,000 | The jobs stop the same week |
| Lead marketplace | $333, before the price war | The jobs stop, and the margin never recovers |
| Your own channel | $833 and falling | It keeps producing for months |
The column nobody fills in
Look at that last column again, because it is the one that decides what your company is worth.
A company whose work comes from channels it rents is valued at three to five times profit, when it sells at all. A company with its own brand, its own accounts and its own pipeline goes for eight to twelve. Same revenue, same crews, same trucks. The difference is whether the buyer is purchasing a business or a subscription to somebody else's phone.
You are not selling next year. I know. But you are pricing the thing every day you choose which row to feed.
Build your own version this quarter
Four rows. Last quarter, not last month, because one month of referral luck will lie to you.
For each row: what you paid, how many jobs it signed, and what happens if it disappears on a Tuesday.
Most owners who do this find two things at once. The channel they complain about most is not their most expensive one, and the channel they call free is the one holding their ceiling in place.
If you want a second pair of eyes on the table once you have built it, book a call. Bring the four rows. We will fill in the last column together, and if the honest answer is that you should keep buying appointments for another quarter, that is what you will hear.