Can You Afford Another Crew? Do the Math Before You Hire It

Module 1 · The Owner Trap · Play 8 of 10

The problem in one breath

You're turning roofs away and your best crew is running on fumes, so another crew feels overdue. But a crew isn't one hire. It's a payroll that lands every Friday, plus a truck, fuel, tools and insurance — whether the work shows up that week or not.

Why it happens

Growth gets decided on a feeling. The phone won't quit, the calendar is stacked six weeks out, so you go find men. Nobody runs the arithmetic, because arithmetic feels like accounting and you're a roofer. Then the crew is busy all season and the account is thinner than it was in March. Two numbers never got checked: what that crew costs you loaded — not the hourly, the whole seat — and whether you can carry the work from tear-off to the day the check clears. Payroll comes every week. The money comes when the homeowner, the carrier and the mortgage company get around to it.

The play

Read the three signals before you touch the math. One: you're turning work away or losing it because you can't get there for six weeks — count those roofs, don't just feel them. Two: your best crew is stretched — long days, sloppy corners, callbacks creeping up. Three: your own hours go to production, so you're cutting in a valley while bids sit unpriced and money you're owed goes unchased. One signal is a busy month. All three is a seat.
Price the whole seat, loaded, by the month. Pay for every man on that crew, plus the payroll burden — taxes, comp, whatever else rides on top of a paycheck. Your bookkeeper has your real percentage; don't guess it. For a sub crew it's his rate, no burden. Then the truck payment, fuel, phones, hand tools, and what the added men do to your insurance.
Turn that cost into sold work. Gross profit pays for a seat — not sales. Divide the monthly cost by your gross margin off the job-cost sheet: that's the sold dollars this crew has to put on the board every month to break even. Divide by your average job size and you've got it in roofs. Then check the build side in crew-hours, not days (Play 4) — more roofs than the men can finish, and no hire fixes it.
Count the weeks between the work and the money. This is what breaks a hire that penciled out fine. Payroll is Friday; the final check is weeks out, so you need cash parked to cover the gap. If that number scares you, the timing is wrong, not the hire — fill the tank first (Play 11), and if payroll is tight this month you're in cash war room territory, not hiring territory.
Name the man who'll run it before you hire the men. A crew with no foreman is you, on a roof, seven days a week — and he probably already works for you (Play 7).

Do this this week

Sit down with your job-cost sheet and last month's bank statement, open the-next-hire-math-sheet.xlsx, and fill one row for the crew you're thinking about. Twenty minutes, and you'll have the number nobody says out loud: the roofs a month that crew has to build before it's worth having.

The tool

Get the sheet

Opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or LibreOffice. Grab it on the phone now — it’ll be waiting on the computer at the shop.

the-next-hire-math-sheet.xlsx — the next-hire math sheet. Two boxes up top: your gross margin (B2) and your average job size (B3), both shipped with placeholder numbers you type over. Then one row per seat you're weighing — this crew today, a salesman or a production manager next year, same sheet. You put in the seat name, monthly pay, the payroll burden % (zero for a sub crew), and the truck/fuel/phone/tools/insurance that seat adds. Out comes the total monthly cost, the sold dollars behind it, the jobs a month that is, and — once you put in the weeks you wait to get paid — the cash you need parked to float it. Put the jobs a month you're turning away in column J and the last column reads COVERS IT or NOT YET. Row 6 is an example; delete it. Every formula is in the sheet notes below.

If your crew is 1099

A sub crew changes the math, not the question. His rate goes in the pay column, zero in the burden column, and the truck and tool lines he covers himself come out. The float stays: you pay his invoice long before the homeowner pays you. What you can't do is buy a "crew" as subs and then run them like your own men — set their day, hand out the tools, tell each man where to stand. Run a sub crew that way long enough and what you've really built starts to look like a payroll, so keep it in the scope and price on his agreement and ask your accountant where that line sits.

M1-08 · Can You Afford Another Crew? Do the Math Before You Hire It — Roofer MBA, https://roofermba.com/plays/owner-trap/can-you-afford-another-crew

The sheet notes

How the sheet works — the columns and the formulas

The columns, the formulas behind them, and the judgment calls — so you can rebuild it by hand if you ever need to.

What it does

One row per seat you are thinking about — a fourth crew, a first salesman, a production manager. You type what the seat costs you every month; the sheet works out the total monthly cost loaded, the sold dollars a month that cost has to have behind it, how many jobs a month that is, and the cash you need parked to float the wait between doing the work and getting paid. Type in the jobs a month you are turning away right now and the last column says COVERS IT or NOT YET.

Row 6 (cream) is filled in as an example with placeholder numbers. Delete it before you put your real seats in.

How to use it

Set the two boxes at the top first. Your gross margin (B2) comes off your job-cost sheet — the sheet ships with 25% typed in, which is an example, not your number. Your average job size (B3) ships with $12,000 in it, same deal: total sold dollars last year divided by the jobs you built.
Name the seat in column A. One row per seat, not per man.
Fill B, C and D: monthly pay, payroll burden % (taxes, comp and whatever else rides on a paycheck — your bookkeeper has your real number; put 0 for a sub crew or a true 1099), and the truck, fuel, phone, tools and insurance that seat adds every month.
Read E, F and G. That's what the seat costs and what it has to produce.
Put the weeks from doing the work to getting paid in H — tear-off to the final check clearing, honestly, not the number on your contract. Column I tells you the cash you need parked to float it.
Put the jobs a month you are turning away in J. K reads COVERS IT (green) or NOT YET (red).
A production manager sells nothing, so leave H and J blank on his row and read column E alone. That monthly cost is the number he has to beat in callbacks you stop eating, jobs that stop sitting, and hours handed back to you.

Columns

Column	What it is
A Seat you're thinking about	Which seat this row is — "fourth crew", "first salesman", "production manager". You type it.
B Monthly pay	What the seat gets paid every month. A whole crew's pay if the seat is a crew; the sub's monthly rate if it's a sub crew. You type it.
C Payroll burden % (0 for a sub)	Payroll taxes, workers' comp, benefits — everything that rides on top of the paycheck, as a percentage. Your bookkeeper has it. 0 for a sub. You type it.
D Truck, fuel, phone, tools, insurance (monthly)	Everything else the seat drags in every month. For a salesman this line is his gas, phone, sample board and what you spend to put leads in front of him. You type it.
E TOTAL MONTHLY COST	Auto: `pay + burden + the truck/fuel/phone/tools/insurance line`.
F Sold dollars a month this seat must produce	Auto: the seat's monthly cost divided by your gross margin — because gross profit pays for a seat, not sales.
G Jobs a month that is	Auto: those sold dollars divided by your average job size.
H Weeks from doing the work to getting paid	Tear-off to the money landing. You type it.
I Cash parked to float it	Auto: what you have to carry while you wait — see the formula note below.
J Jobs a month you're turning away now	Work you're saying no to or losing today. You type it.
K Verdict	Auto: COVERS IT when the work you're turning away is at least the jobs a month the seat must add; NOT YET when it isn't. Blank until G and J both have numbers.

Top of sheet: your gross margin (B2) and your average job size (B3) — the two numbers every row is built on.

Formulas (so you can rebuild it by hand)

Total monthly cost (E6, fill down): =IF(COUNT(B6,D6)=0,"",B6*(1+C6)+D6)
Sold dollars a month (F6, fill down): =IF(OR(E6="",$B$2=0),"",E6/$B$2)
Jobs a month (G6, fill down): =IF(OR(F6="",$B$3=0),"",F6/$B$3)
Cash parked to float it (I6, fill down): =IF(OR(F6="",H6=""),"",ROUND(F6/4.33*H6,0))
Verdict (K6, fill down): =IF(OR(G6="",J6=""),"",IF(J6>=G6,"COVERS IT","NOT YET"))
The colors are conditional formatting, not formulas in cells. Two rules on K6:K12: =ISNUMBER(SEARCH("NOT YET",K6)) fills the cell red, =ISNUMBER(SEARCH("COVERS",K6)) fills it green.
The COUNT and OR guards are what keep the empty rows empty instead of showing a divide error.

Only IF, OR, COUNT, ROUND, ISNUMBER, SEARCH and plain arithmetic are used, so it opens and computes in old Excel, Numbers and LibreOffice.

Notes and judgment calls

The example row, worked all the way through. Row 6 is a fourth crew at $16,000 a month in pay, 25% burden, $2,200 a month in truck, fuel, phone, tools and insurance. That's $16,000 × 1.25 = $20,000, plus $2,200 — a $22,200 seat every month. At the 25% margin in B2 it needs $88,800 of sold work a month behind it, which at the $12,000 average job in B3 is 7.4 jobs a month. Six weeks between the work and the money puts $123,048 of cash on the float line. The owner is turning away 5 jobs a month, and 5 is less than 7.4 — so the verdict reads NOT YET. Every one of those numbers is a placeholder. Yours will be different, and that is the whole point.
Why the float number is built off the sold dollars, not the pay. At break-even, every dollar the seat sells goes back out as job cost or as the seat itself. So the money going out each week is the sold-dollars number divided by 4.33 (that's 52 weeks over 12 months), and you multiply it by the weeks you wait to get paid. It is deliberately blunt: it tells you roughly how much cash has to sit in the account while the work is out ahead of the money.
The verdict compares jobs, not dollars. Owners can picture roofs. The column asks what you are turning away today, on purpose — not what you hope to sell once the seat is filled. NOT YET does not mean never; it means the work has to show up first, or the seat has to cost less.
Burden is a real number, not a rule of thumb. The 25% in the example is there so the sheet computes out of the box. Ask your bookkeeper what your payroll actually costs on top of wages, and put that in. For a sub crew, 0 is correct — his rate is the whole labor line.
Seven rows, and then it stops. Rows 6 through 12 carry the formulas; the "HOW TO READ IT" notes sit from row 14 down. A seat typed on row 13 gets no math. That is the signal to start a fresh copy of the sheet, not to type past the block.
The sheet ships with its numbers already saved in it, so a phone preview shows real figures; they recalculate the moment you type.

The one thing

Do this this week

Take it with you

Get the sheet

One email unlocks this and every other sheet and card on the site. The plays stay free.

Same fire

You're turning work away but you can't tell if you can afford another crew

M1-08can you afford another crew — you’re here
M1-09your first salesman
M1-10the man who runs the schedule

All the fires →

Fixed this?

Once the math says the seat pays for itself, the fire moves to finding the man — and the good ones get spoken for months before you need them.

The fire right behind it is usually You're hiring.