Double Your Profit Day #30 How We Doubled Profits By Slashing Overhead!

Welcome to Day 30 of the Double Your Profit Series

The go-to series for contractors, home service owners, and small business entrepreneurs.
Today’s topic is one of the biggest levers you have in scaling your company: Cut Overhead Like a Maniac.

🧠 Why This Matters

Overhead is the silent profit stopper. Left unchecked, it can balloon quickly and quietly, eating into your margins without driving real growth. Every dollar tied up in overhead is a dollar not fueling revenue, marketing, or growth. To truly scale, you need to ruthlessly evaluate — and eliminate — non-strategic costs.

💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

Why overhead rarely drives revenue (and what actually does).

The danger of overinvesting in facilities and creating bloated fixed costs.

Smart strategies: combining roles, automating back office, and outsourcing non-strategic work.

Why cutting consultants is often the easiest way to reclaim cash.

The “cut first, ask questions later” philosophy to move fast on savings.

How to reward outperformance while cutting costs at the same time.

💸This Episode is Brought to You by CFO Made Easy

Built a strong trades business? Let’s take it to $10M and beyond. CFO Made Easy offers part-time CFO services for home and trade service businesses—helping you boost cash flow, maximize profit per tech, and make clear growth decisions.

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🔥 Think of this episode as your mandate to build lean: trim the fat, invest only in what drives growth, and keep overhead from choking profit.

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John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC

📌 Disclaimer: Some links may include UTM parameters or affiliate relationships, meaning we may earn a commission if you make a purchase. Episodes may feature sponsors, but all opinions expressed are our own.

Transcript

 Welcome back to Double Your Profit. This is our final video in this series. If you enjoyed this series, make sure you comment below other things that you'd like a series on. I had a ton of fun doing this and just sort of continuing to share the tools and the thoughts that have helped drive us from a small business to now a larger one.

Today's topic is cut overhead like a maniac. Overhead as a whole could be considered. Non-strategic costs should be ruthlessly eradicated from your business. In order for you to scale to whatever your aspirations are, every dollar needs to go to its highest impact. Its highest impact is very rarely found inside overhead.

So when we're thinking about overhead as a whole, the goal is lean. Here's some philosophies that have helped us over the years maintain a lean overhead while still growing. 30% a year, overhead's typically not gonna drive revenue. You have to be really cautious. A lot of tools tell you they will, but marketing is really the only part of that that's going to drive revenue over.

Investing in your facility is a great example of bloated overhead. You can have too much facility, it can be too nice. You should be able to offer your team a great and safe and clean place to work, but it does not need to be bougie. Combine roles. Automate back office and outsource non-strategic. We want to make the most of the investments that we have already made.

If we have these people, if we have this software, if we have this stuff, how do we use that to its highest potential? Cut consultants, that one's super easy. You probably have consultants. You probably don't need 'em. You can cut that out. You can't add a bunch of money. Move fast. The I sentence here is cut first, ask questions later.

Force an approval process. What that means is we're not gonna give open credit card limits. We're not gonna say yes to everything. We want approval for new costs to be kind of painful. We want to say no a lot. Track overhead percentage, and set strict targets. What's been really fun about having the pro group and having peer groups is understanding what other people can do.

I have friends driving businesses my size with less overhead. Find out how they're saving, find out what your target is and how can you get the delta. Finally, drive cost savings. As a culture, how do we continue to find efficiency? How do we continue to find automation? How do we continue to cut out complexity?

How do you continue to drive this through so that it's not just you as the owner or the leader of that? Team, but it's the whole team. If someone is running a profitable department and continuing to focus on outperformance while simultaneously cutting costs, they should be rewarded for that energy.

Overhead is one of the secret killers. 'cause it can balloon really fast and it's hard to cut, but evaluate it constantly and set hard targets and get your team involved so that it's not just you, but it's the whole team focusing on that double digit profit. Thanks for following along on this Double Your Profit series.

I hope over the next six months that you can double your profit. We've used all of these lessons over the past 10 years to not just grow our profit, but also grow our business as a whole, all focused on running a profitable enterprise so that we can reinvest into the strategic cost that matter. Thanks for following, which you like and.