What We'd Do Differently If We Started Over (Episode 101)

If you could wave a magic wand and rebuild your business with everything you know now, what would you change first? In Episode 101 of the Unlocked Podcast, recorded in person at the Brivo Cloud Security Summit in Arlington, Texas, Lars (Calgary Lock & Safe), Tony (Assured Security), and Chad (Loc-Doc Security) look back at the businesses they inherited and ask exactly that, using the three buckets from Traction: finance, operations, and sales.

The audience they had in mind is the owner running a business under $2–3 million, buried in the day-to-day whirlwind and wondering why all that effort isn't showing up on the bottom line.

Finance: Stop Lumping Everything Into "Sales"

The first fix is granular accounting. Most young businesses have revenue, expenses, and wages, and not much else. Break revenue into retail, service, and project work, and split hardware from labor. Separate commodities like grade 2 lever sets and door closers, which should be your high-margin items, and split wages between people in the field and people in the office. When everything sits on one line called "sales," it's hard to build a strategy around where you actually make money.

A practical starting point, borrowed from Glenn Younger: pull your top 100 customers by revenue and categorize them. The hosts suggested dropping your QuickBooks top customer report into a free AI tool and asking it to group those customers into sales channels.

Asked which numbers show a business's health in five minutes, the hosts landed on net income first, then salaries as a percent of revenue (typically 34–40%), then cost of materials as a percent of revenue. With a roughly 50/50 hardware-to-labor mix and keystone pricing, hardware cost should sit around 25% of revenue or lower. The quiet killer is cost creep: the widget you priced at $100 because it cost $50 now costs $63, and nobody notices because the supplier invoice shows up 30 days after you sold it.

The Costs That Grow Faster Than Revenue

People are the first. Without streamlined processes, adding headcount just means two people doing the same thing poorly. One host stepped into purchasing himself and found a job that really took two hours a day being done as a ten-hour job, because of all the extra steps. His instinct had been to hire another purchaser. The better answer was to fix the process. His tip: hand a broken process to the person who always finds the shortcut.

Capital is the second. Adding a road technician means roughly $100,000 in van, inventory, wrap, and key machines before they bill a dollar. Rather than draining the bank account, the hosts recommend borrowing at reasonable rates, knowing your line-of-credit rate as a baseline, and putting someone, even a fractional controller, on a 13-week cash flow forecast and budget.

Operations: Who Owns Quote to Invoice?

Ask three people in your company how a job moves from approved quote to invoice, and you'll likely get three answers. Get the team in a room with sticky notes and map every step. One of the hosts recalled making a single person responsible for sending quotes and ordering parts when the company had about nine people, and it roughly doubled their size within a year.

Watch for processes built around edge cases. The pain of a one-in-a-thousand problem leads teams to bolt hours of extra work onto everything. Put edge cases on a different-colored sticky note and keep asking, "How often does this actually happen?" Their list of things to cut included counting five-cent keys, van inventory audits that spend $100 to find a $70 loss, accepting cash, and net-30 terms.

Sales: Which Customers Actually Make You Money?

Most owners name their best customer by volume, not value. Print your top 20 customers and ask purchasing, sales, and your technicians who they like working with and why. The customer everyone hates is probably costing you more than you think. Score customers on volume, average ticket, payment speed, and return visits, then go fix the friction. Sometimes that's as simple as learning the customer has three work-order systems with different numbering.

Their day-one picks if they were starting tomorrow: review your sell price on products, whiteboard your service-request process, check that your labor rates are profitable, and hire a proactive salesperson who isn't a former technician.

As you look at your business this week, ask yourself: if I were starting over today, what would I refuse to rebuild?

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Assured Security: assuredsecurity.com

Loc-Doc Security: locdoc.com

Calgary Lock & Safe: calgarylockandsafe.ca