How to scale a renovation company past $5M
Most renovation companies stall somewhere between one and three million dollars a year. It is rarely a lack of work. Every job still runs through the owner’s head — the prices, the schedule, the follow-up, the numbers. Getting past five million means building a machine: a clear structure, a job-delivery road every project travels, and a dashboard that tells you the truth every week.
The company family tree
Everything starts with one owner and three departments. At a million dollars, the owner is all three. At five million, each branch has a leader — and every system on the branch below them has to run without the owner touching it.
- MarketingContrax
- LeadsContrax
- SalesContrax
- CRMContrax
- ReferralsContrax
- ProjectsContrax
- Project managersContrax
- CrewsContrax
- Trades & subsContrax
- SchedulingContrax
- BookkeepingContrax
- Job costingContrax
- Cash flowContrax
- PayrollContrax
- Work in progressnot yet
The road every job travels
Below the tree is the road. Every job moves through the same nine stops, in order. A company scales when each stop is a system — repeatable, measured, and not dependent on one person remembering. Scroll down the road.
Attract
Leads come from your website, Google, referrals, social and past clients. Small companies live on word of mouth; companies that scale add channels they control and know what each one costs.
Qualify
Not every lead is a job. Qualifying means asking budget, timeline and fit early, then following up on a schedule instead of from memory — the leads that go cold are usually the ones nobody called back.
Sell
The estimate is where the money is made or lost. At scale it can’t live in one person’s head: it needs a rate book, a standard scope by phase, and a second set of eyes before it goes out.
Win
A signed contract with a clear scope, a deposit and a payment schedule protects both sides. Changes after signing go through change orders, never a phone call and a handshake.
Prepare
The gap between “sold” and “started” is where jobs go wrong. Materials ordered, subs booked, the schedule set and the client told what to expect — before the crew shows up.
Build
Production runs on a schedule, a daily log and constant client communication. The owner shouldn’t need to be on site to know what happened today.
Control
Checking the numbers while the job is still running is what separates a profitable company from a busy one. Hours, materials and subs against the estimate, every week.
Finish
Closing out properly — final invoice paid, real costs tallied, the warranty in the client’s hands — is what turns a finished job into a reference.
Multiply
The cheapest lead is a happy past client. Companies that scale make the review, the referral and the repeat job part of the process, not luck.
Five layers under every system
Software only covers one of these on its own. The reason to put the whole road in one system is the fourth layer: when the estimate, the hours, the bills and the invoices live in one place, the numbers are already there — nobody has to assemble them at month end.
The weekly dashboard
Sales
Leads, pipeline, close rate, average job size.
Jobs
Revenue, margin by job, schedule, backlog.
People
Labour hours, crew capacity, training.
Cash
What clients owe, what you owe, cash-flow forecast, profit.
In Contrax the pipeline lives in the CRM, job margin in each project budget, hours in timesheets, and cash in Finance — receivables, payables, a cash-flow forecast and a GST/HST return built from the same records.