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Free Field DiagnosticHow Much Is Your Shop Leaking?
Five numbers. Two minutes. Conservative estimates across the 7 EBITDA leaks — built from the same model experienced operators use to find margin in a home services business.
That's the headline. Enter your email to unlock the full breakdown — which of the seven leaks is costing you most, and where to fix it first.
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These totals are de-overlapped, capped at 15% of revenue, and rounded down at every step. The leaks interact — recovering one shrinks another — so the total is deliberately less than the sum of the individual estimates. Conservative on purpose.
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How the calculator works
How does the EBITDA Leak Calculator work?
The calculator takes five inputs — annual revenue, number of trucks, number of techs, average ticket, and gross margin — and estimates your annual loss across the seven EBITDA leaks using conservative operator benchmarks: a $120/hour billable rate, 220 working days per year, 1,760 paid hours per tech, and a 30% parts-to-revenue ratio. Each leak has its own formula. Scheduling losses scale with truck count; parts markup losses scale with revenue and gross margin; callback losses scale with job count (revenue divided by average ticket) at a 2% excess callback rate and $200 per callback; pricing losses compare your average ticket against a $420 target; and labour losses scale with tech count and paid hours. Every raw estimate is then scaled back by 20% and rounded down to the nearest $500 before you see it. The calculation runs in your browser; when you submit, your email and the numbers you entered are saved so the IronMargin team can follow up.
How accurate is the estimate?
It is deliberately conservative — a starting point for a P&L conversation, not an audit. Every leak is scaled back by 20% and rounded down to the nearest $500. The scheduling and labour leaks both measure billable-hour recovery, so the total de-overlaps them rather than double-counting: the model takes the larger of the two in full and only 35% of the smaller. Each individual leak is capped at 10% of your revenue, and the total is capped at 15% of revenue and rounded down to the nearest $1,000. If your real numbers turn out worse than the estimate, that is by design — the goal is credibility, not shock.
What is the biggest EBITDA leak for most trades businesses?
Labour productivity and non-billable time — the gap between the hours you pay for and the hours you actually bill. It is the single largest leak in the system: most owners pay for 40 hours per tech and bill 22–26 without realising it. In the calculator it shows up across two rows — Labour Productivity & Non-Billable Time and Scheduling & Route Density — because shop time and windshield time are both paid hours that never get billed. Recovering even 5 utilisation points here typically pays for a membership many times over.