Straight answers, with the sums shown
The questions small business owners actually ask, answered directly and with real arithmetic rather than advice you cannot act on. No signup, nothing gated.
I run a small commercial cleaning company and we are busy but barely profitable — what should I change first?
Check your two or three largest contracts first — in most small cleaning companies one or two accounts are being serviced at close to cost, and they are usually the oldest ones, priced years ago and never revisited. Work out the actual hours on site per month against what you bill for that account. If the effective rate is below your fully-loaded labour cost plus about 35%, that single contract is where your profit went, and repricing it moves more money than winning two new clients.
Should I raise my prices, or will I just lose the customers I have?
You will lose some, and that is the correct outcome rather than the risk. A 10% rise across the board typically loses 5–10% of customers in trades and services, which leaves you meaningfully ahead: at 10% more revenue per customer and 8% of customers gone, you are up about 1.2% on revenue while doing 8% less work. The people who leave over 10% are almost always the lowest-margin accounts you have.
How do I add monthly recurring revenue to a trade business that only ever bills by the job?
Sell a maintenance or priority-response plan to the customers already in your database, not to new ones. A typical plan runs £15–£35 a month in the UK or $19–$40 in the US, and realistic take-up on a warm past-customer list is 10–20%. A trade with 400 past customers converting 15% at £25 a month is £1,500 a month of recurring revenue from work you have already done and people who already trust you.
My bookkeeping practice is completely full but I am not making enough money — what is wrong?
Almost certainly scope creep on legacy clients rather than underpricing new ones. In most practices the fee was set when the client was smaller, and transaction volume, payroll and extra entities have grown into it without the fee moving. Compare current monthly transaction counts against what the original engagement assumed — if a client has doubled in volume on the same fee, they are now paying roughly half your intended rate, and there are usually three or four of them.
How do I make more money from my dog grooming business without taking on more dogs?
Work on booking frequency before price. Most grooming salons lose more money to clients stretching from six weeks to nine than to underpricing — a client at six-week intervals is nine grooms a year, at nine weeks it is under six, which is a 35% revenue drop from the same customer. Rebooking at the till, before they leave, is worth more than a price rise and costs nothing.
I think I am quoting some jobs below cost but I cannot tell which ones — how do I work it out?
Calculate your fully-loaded hourly cost and compare it to what you actually billed per hour on the last ten jobs, including travel and the time spent quoting. Most sole traders and small contractors discover their real cost is 1.3 to 1.5 times the bare wage once vehicle, insurance, tools, unbilled travel and non-billable hours are included — and that jobs quoted as a fixed price routinely land below it once the overruns are counted.
How do I make a window cleaning round more profitable without adding more houses?
Density beats volume. A round where the houses are close together earns far more per day than a bigger round spread across a wider area, because driving time is unpaid and it is usually the largest single cost after labour. Drop or reprice the outliers — the customers who require a fifteen-minute drive for one £12 clean — and the same working day fits more paid work.
My gardening and landscaping business is flat out all summer but I have nothing to show for it — why?
Two causes, and it is usually both. Green waste disposal has risen sharply and most maintenance rounds were priced before it did, so every visit now carries a cost that is not in the price. And the gardens themselves have grown — a round priced four years ago is servicing materially more plant than it was quoted for, at the same visit rate.
We run a small MSP and our per-user pricing no longer covers what we actually deliver — how do we fix it?
Separate pass-through licensing from your service fee and stop absorbing vendor increases. Most small MSPs quietly swallow annual Microsoft and security-vendor rises to avoid a conversation, which permanently rebases their margin downward every year. Licensing should be billed as a distinct line that moves when the vendor moves, leaving your service fee to be negotiated on its own merits.
Should I focus on getting more customers or making more from the ones I already have?
Almost always the customers you already have, because there is no acquisition cost and no delay. A 10% price rise across an existing book lands next month at effectively zero cost; winning 10% more customers requires marketing spend, sales time and typically two to three months before the first invoice. For a business under about twenty people, the existing book is nearly always the larger and faster opportunity.
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