What is the difference between job efficiency and operational efficiency?
Job efficiency measures how your team performs once they are actually on site. You calculate it by dividing billable hours by actual hours on the job, then multiplying by 100. If you quoted four hours and the team finished in three, your job efficiency is 133%.
Operational efficiency is the bigger picture. It takes in every hour you pay for across the whole day, including travel at the start and end of the day, any time away from site, and anything else that eats into paid time. You divide billable hours by total hours paid and multiply by 100. A team can show over 100% job efficiency and still come in under 90% for the day once all those extra hours are counted.
Both numbers matter. Looking at only one gives you a false picture of where your profit is going.
Why can finishing jobs early actually hurt your profitability?
If your team smashes through a couple of small jobs at 150% efficiency and then knocks off at two in the afternoon, the job-level numbers look great. But your cost of operations is calculated across the whole day, and you are still paying wages for those remaining hours.
Finishing early on small jobs without having the next job ready to fill the gap means you are carrying idle paid time. That is a direct hit to your labour productivity even though the individual jobs looked efficient.
How do you track this week to week?
Greg has built a reflection tool you can print out and fill in each week. It works through four numbers: total billable hours for the week, actual hours on site, and total hours paid. From those you calculate both your job efficiency percentage and your operational efficiency percentage.
The tool also includes reflection questions: what went well, what contributed to higher efficiency, what caused lower efficiency, and what actions you will take next week. Running through this every week builds a habit of spotting and fixing small leaks before they compound.
What kind of problems show up when you do this regularly?
Greg highlights several that are easy to miss until you look at the numbers:
- Sick leave and annual leave. A month can feel flat-out busy while the numbers show a loss, simply because multiple people were off at different times.
- Callbacks and rework. When you cannot charge for fixing a mistake, those hours disappear straight off your efficiency.
- Variations that were not captured. If the scope changed and you could not charge for it, the extra time still shows up in your costs.
- Unconverted quoting time. Driving out to quote jobs that do not convert is unbillable time that costs you just as much as any other lost hour.
- Upsell opportunities missed. If you are already on site, adding extra jobs to the visit compounds the value of the travel and setup time you have already paid for.
How did tracking wholesaler trips reveal a major profit leak?
When Greg's business started doing this reflection properly, they noticed frequent trips to the wholesaler mid-job. They added up the cost of all that unbillable time across the team for a month and found it was somewhere between $50,000 and $70,000.
The pattern was consistent: a technician would arrive on site, find they were missing a part, drive to the wholesaler, spend time at the counter, grab lunch on the way back, and return to a schedule that had already pushed other jobs back. That created rescheduling, disappointed customers, and lower quality of service.
To test a fix, the team introduced a rule they called "wholesalers a lava": going to the wholesaler in the middle of the day was off limits. Instead, when a part was needed, they called an Uber that was already near the wholesaler to pick it up and deliver it to the job. The team kept working, the part arrived, they finished the job without leaving site, and no jobs had to be rescheduled. That one change came directly from doing the weekly reflection.
How do you use the efficiency number to plan next week?
The last section of the reflection tool asks what actions you can take to increase efficiency the following week and where time allocation could have been more effective. The point is not just to measure what happened but to build a specific improvement plan before the next week starts.
Doing this consistently, even just reviewing last week with the tool and identifying one thing to change, is how small operational improvements stack up into meaningful profit gains over time.
