Roofer MBA — 128 plays for the business side of a roofing company. Free to read, no account, nothing for sale. What this is →
The Number That Tells You Next Month
Module 9 · Sales & Leads · Play 14 of 14
The problem in one breath
By the time the bank account tells you sales are down, the sales were down six weeks ago — and whatever you do about it today lands six weeks from now.
Why it happens
Cash is the last thing to move. A slow week in the ad account shows up as fewer calls, then fewer inspections, then fewer signed contracts, then a schedule that only goes out ten days instead of five weeks, and finally as a Friday where payroll is tight. Every one of those was visible before the bank balance moved. Most owners are only watching the last one, which is the only one they cannot do anything about.
The play
- Learn the chain in order, because you can watch the front of it. Ad conversions drop, then phone calls drop, then inspections drop, then signed contracts drop, then the schedule stops reaching as far out as it used to. Same chain every time. An empty August is announced in June, in the ad account.
- Pick one number and put it on the wall: inspections scheduled for next week. It sits upstream of everything that matters, it is already in your calendar, and it does not care what kind of work is coming — repairs, maintenance and re-roofs all average out over enough weeks. If it is falling two weeks running, your next month is already decided.
- Learn your own good week instead of borrowing somebody's. Look back at the weeks that felt good and count the inspections behind them. One shop with a full-time estimator calls five a day across five days a good week and three a day a week where sales will be down — that is their size, their market and their crew, and a two-truck shop reading it as a target is chasing the wrong number. The method transfers; the figure does not.
- Keep the alarm at the top of the chain, in the ad account. Paid search is a black box that will happily spend more of your money — account changes made for you, features pushed that raise spend without serving your goal. Look at it a couple of times a week, every week, and treat that as part of the job rather than something you do when the phone gets quiet.
- Know your close rate; do not build your week around it. One shop runs about forty percent overall, with repairs and maintenance closing far higher than re-roofs — and their owner's own two questions are the reason nobody there stares at it: what exactly is a good close rate, and what do you do when a good salesman misses for two weeks? They pull it out when cash gets strange, because a cash problem is usually a sales problem wearing a different coat.
- Read it every week at the same time, with the schedule open. Inspections booked, estimates out, jobs signed, and how far the schedule reaches. Four numbers, ten minutes, the same morning every week (Module 6, Play 1, "Fifteen Minutes a Week on the Money You're Owed").
- If you track nothing at all today, do not start here. Start by costing a job — material, labor, what you sold it for, overhead, what was left (Module 6, Play 19, "When the Last Check Clears, Grade the Job"). A shop that cannot say whether its jobs make money will not be around long enough for a lead metric to matter.
Do this this week
Open your calendar and count the inspections booked for next week. Write the number down where you will see it Monday. That single number, counted every week, is the whole play.
The tool
Or fill it in here — no download →
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 weekly sales scoreboard is a spreadsheet: one row per week — inspections scheduled and actually run, estimates out, jobs signed, contract dollars, and how far the schedule reaches. It works out your close rate, your estimates per inspection, your average job size, and a rolling four-week average of inspections, then compares your last four weeks against your own history and tells you plainly whether the next month is coming in light. Fill the yellow columns once a week, same morning.
If your crew is 1099
Schedule depth is the number a sub-crew shop has to watch hardest. Your crews go where the work is, and a board that has thinned to ten days is the week they start taking someone else's jobs — which means you are short-handed exactly when your own work comes back (Module 12, Play 1, "Your Crew Or His, Priced On One Real Job"). Watch how far out the schedule reaches, not just how full this week looks.
M9-14 · The Number That Tells You Next Month — Roofer MBA, https://roofermba.com/plays/sales-leads/the-number-that-tells-you-next-month
The sheet notesHow 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 worksheet, Weeks. It takes one row per week — what was on the calendar, what actually happened, and what got signed — and works out the four things a week can tell you, plus the one thing a run of weeks can tell you: whether the next month is coming in light. The question it answers is the one a bank balance answers six weeks too late — is sales slowing down, and can I still do something about it.
The log is rows 7 through 32, twenty-six weeks. Columns A through G are yellow: that is where you type. Columns H through L are gray: they work themselves out, and you never type in them. The answer block sits at rows 36 through 47 — C36 is the guard, C37 through C46 are the answers, green except for the gray guard, and C47 is the one-line verdict. Row 3 is the banner that says the same thing. Rows 49 through 57 are the closing prose, each one merged across A:L.
The seven yellow columns:
| Col | What you type | Format |
|---|---|---|
| A | Week starting — the Monday | date |
| B | Inspections booked for that week — what was on the calendar | whole number |
| C | Inspections actually run — what you got on the roof for | whole number |
| D | Estimates sent that week | whole number |
| E | Jobs signed that week | whole number |
| F | Contract dollars signed that week | $ |
| G | How far the schedule reaches out on Friday, in weeks | one decimal |
The five gray columns, per row:
| Col | What it works out |
|---|---|
| H | Ran vs booked — C/B, how much of the calendar survived the week |
| I | Estimates per inspection — D/C |
| J | Close rate for that week — E/D |
| K | Average job signed — F/E |
| L | Four-week average booked — AVERAGE of this row and the three above it, blank until there are four |
How to use it
Same morning every week, calendar open, ten minutes. Money meeting is a fine place for it (Module 6, Play 1).
- Type the Monday in column A.
- Fill B through G from the calendar and the signed contracts. If a week was dead, log the zeros — do not skip the row.
- Read C45 and C46: the last four weeks, and the last four weeks against your own average.
- Read C47. That is the whole sheet in one sentence.
Column A is the only column that turns a row on. Type a week there and the gray columns start working; leave it blank and the row stays quiet no matter what else is in it.
The example
Twenty-six made-up weeks, filled in yellow, that get quietly slower at the end: booked inspections run in the mid-teens for five months and then slide into the low tens. Every number in it is invented so you can watch the sheet run, and none of it is a target. With that example loaded, the sheet reports about 15.6 inspections booked in an average week, a best week of 20 and a slowest of 10, a 40% close rate, roughly one estimate per inspection run, an average signed job around $10,700 — and a last-four weeks average of 11, which is 70% of that shop's own normal. The verdict prints the alarm: next month is already thin, and the fix goes into the ad account and the phone this week.
Select A7:G32, press Delete, and put your own weeks in.
The guard, term by term
C36 counts problems, not bad rows — one half-typed week can raise it by more than one. Anything but zero and every green cell prints Fix the rows that don't line up instead of an answer.
| Term | What it catches |
|---|---|
COUNTIFS(A,"<>",X,"") ×6 | A week is typed but B, C, D, E, F or G is blank |
COUNTIFS(A,"",X,"<>") ×6 | A number is typed on a row with no week — an orphan |
SUMPRODUCT((A<>"")*(E>D)) | More jobs signed than estimates sent |
SUMPRODUCT((A<>"")*(E>0)*(F<=0)) | Jobs signed with no contract dollars |
SUMPRODUCT((A<>"")*(F>0)*(E=0)) | Contract dollars with no job signed |
SUMPRODUCT((A<>"")*((B<0)+…+(G<0))) | Any negative |
SUMPRODUCT((A7:A31="")*(A8:A32<>"")) | A blank week left in the middle of the log |
SUMPRODUCT((A<>"")*(COUNTIF(A,A&"")>1)) | The same week typed twice |
The last two matter more here than on any other sheet in the library: C45 reads the four newest rows by counting how many weeks are filled, so a gap or a duplicate would silently move the four weeks it is looking at.
Checked both ways: with the example loaded the guard reads 0 and every answer prints. Injecting one week with more jobs than estimates, one blank week in the middle, and one duplicated week takes the guard to 4 and every green cell down to the stop sentence.
What the guard cannot catch is a wrong but believable number. Book five inspections, log fifteen, and the sheet recalculates happily and lies to you every week afterward.
Adding rows
Type into the empty yellow rows down to row 32 — H through L are already there and start working the moment a week goes in column A. Twenty-six rows is half a year on purpose: when you run out, start a fresh copy for the next half-year rather than stretching the ranges, and keep the old one so you can see what a good spring looked like.
What it does not do
It does not know whether those jobs made money — Module 6, Play 19 grades a finished job. It does not know where the leads came from — Play 1 of this module counts that. It does not know what a good week looks like anywhere but in your own shop; every comparison it makes is against your own history, on purpose. And it does not tell you what to do about a thin month. That is the play.
Take it with you
One email unlocks this and every other sheet and card on the site. The plays stay free.
Same fire
Cash is fine this week and you can't see next month
- M9-14the number that tells you next month — you’re here
Fixed this?
Every thin winter was a slow six weeks somewhere in the fall that nobody was counting at the time.
The fire right behind it is usually Winter's coming and cash is thin.