The Profit Leak Scorecard

You can copy this method and do it yourself. Score the 20 statements. Count the checks. Name your worst zone. Buy Now is the packaged Notion page you duplicate and fill in, so you are not rebuilding the scorecard from a blank doc.

Stop guessing. Start detecting. This is the entry diagnostic in the Profit Detective toolkit. Five revenue leak zones. Four statements each. Five minutes. You walk out with a Leak Index (0-100), your #1 zone, and a rough yearly dollar figure.

How to score

Check each statement that is true of your business today. Each check is a leak. Count them at the bottom. Total checks out of 20, then multiply by 5 to get your Leak Index.

Zone 1: Estimating & scope

Money left in the estimate. The leak here is invisible because you never see the dollars you did not ask for.

• We regularly find scope we forgot to bill after a job closes.
• Estimators don’t consistently capture every line item the carrier allows.
• We rarely review estimate-vs-final variance by estimator.
• We discount or eat change orders to keep the adjuster happy.

Zone 2: Job costing & margin

Jobs that cost more than you think. Most shops cannot name true margin on the job they finished last Tuesday.

• We don’t know true gross margin on a job until weeks after it closes.
• Labor hours routinely run over what we estimated.
• Equipment and materials aren’t tracked back to specific jobs.
• We’ve finished jobs that lost money and didn’t catch it early.

Zone 3: Cash flow & collections

Work done, cash not collected. You can be profitable on paper and still broke.

• Carrier or TPA payments routinely take longer than they should.
• We carry receivables we’ve quietly stopped chasing.
• We’ve floated payroll on a credit line to cover slow collections.
• We have no standard follow-up cadence for unpaid invoices.

Zone 4: Sales & conversion

Leads in, jobs lost. A conversion problem and a marketing problem have different fixes. You cannot tell them apart if you do not know the rate.

• We don’t know our lead-to-job conversion rate.
• Inbound calls sometimes hit voicemail during business hours.
• We don’t track which marketing actually produced our best jobs.
• We have no system to follow up on quotes that didn’t close.

Zone 5: Leadership & overhead

The owner is the bottleneck. This zone caps the whole pyramid, and it is the one owners least want to investigate.

• The business can’t run a full week without the owner.
• We don’t review one shared KPI as a team every week.
• Overhead has crept up but we haven’t re-examined it in a year.
• Every important decision funnels through one person.

Your Leak Index

Total checks: ___ / 20. Multiply by 5. That is your Leak Index (0-100).

• 0-20 Tight ship. Minor seepage. Tighten the few gaps.
• 21-45 Active leak. You are losing real money in 1-2 zones.
• 46-70 Major leak. The profit is pouring out. Pick your worst zone now.
• 71-100 Hemorrhaging. This is the #1 threat to the business.

Estimate the dollars

The scorecard’s teaching math: shops at your score typically leak about (Leak Index ÷ 100) × 14% of revenue. Multiply by your annual revenue for a rough yearly figure. Illustrative. Not a guarantee.

Write down the zone where you checked the most boxes. That is where you start. One zone at a time. The owners who try to plug all five at once plug none.

What to do with the result

1. Write your Leak Index and your worst zone on a card. You will carry those two things into any later work.
2. Pull your trailing-12 P&L and write your actual gross margin % (gross profit ÷ revenue). If you cannot find it in under 10 minutes, that is a finding.
3. Write one sentence: the story you have been telling yourself about profitability that you are now going to test against evidence.
4. If Zone 2 won, run last 10 closed jobs through a job-costing table (revenue, labor, equipment, materials, subs). If Zone 3 won, age your AR and total 60+ and 90+. If Zone 5 won, run an owner-dependency pass: what breaks if you vanish for 30 days.

The playbook’s rule: every restoration shop leaks somewhere. The only variable is whether you are looking. Evidence over opinion. Follow the money. Assume a leak exists.

If you want the packaged scorecard

You can run the 20 statements on a napkin. Buy Now is the Notion page delivered by email after checkout. Duplicate it (··· → Duplicate), check the boxes, and the Leak Index and dollar estimate sit on the same page. Same Square button at the top of this page.