The tool, in your browser
The next-hire math sheet
One card per seat you’re thinking about — a fourth crew, a first salesman, a production manager. Type what the seat costs you every month and it works out the sold dollars a month that cost has to have behind it, the jobs a month that is, and the cash you have to park to float the wait between doing the work and getting paid. Then say how many jobs a month you’re turning away right now, and it answers: covers it, or not yet.
Free, and it asks for nothing. No email, no account, no sign-up. What you type stays in this browser on this device.
Read this first
This sheet only knows about this browser. Nothing you type is sent to us and nothing syncs, so the phone and the office computer each keep their own copy — and anyone who opens this page on that computer can read what you pay people and what your margin is. Clearing your browsing data wipes it, and a new phone won’t bring it along. Keep the-next-hire-math-sheet.xlsx on the computer at the office if these numbers have to last.
The sheet fills in right here in your browser. If this line stays put, JavaScript is off — the spreadsheet below does the same job.
Why the answer is in jobs
You can picture five roofs. You can’t picture $88,800.
The verdict compares jobs a month, not dollars, and it asks what you’re turning away today — on purpose. Not what you hope to sell once the seat is filled. In the example, a $22,200 seat at a 25% margin needs $88,800 of sold work every month, and at a $12,000 average job that’s 7.4 jobs a month. The owner is turning away five. Five is less than 7.4, so it reads not yet — which doesn’t mean never. It means the work has to show up first, or the seat has to cost less.
Both boxes up top are yours, and neither is a rule of thumb. The gross margin comes off your own job costing — the job-cost sheet works it out — and the average job is last year’s sold dollars divided by the jobs you built. Type the margin the way you say it: 25, not 0.25. Same with the payroll burden on a seat — 25, and 0 for a sub crew, because his rate is the whole labor line.
The line that ends most hires
The cash you park is bigger than the seat, every time.
A $22,200 seat needs $123,048 sitting in the account at six weeks to money. That’s the number that kills a hire, and it isn’t the pay — it’s the work out ahead of the money. At break-even every dollar the seat sells goes straight back out as job cost or as the seat itself, so what leaves the account each week is the sold dollars divided by 4.33, times the weeks you wait. It is deliberately blunt: it tells you roughly how much cash has to sit there while the work is out ahead of the money.
Put the honest number of weeks in that box — tear-off to the final check clearing, not the number printed on your contract. The payment schedule worksheet walks one job down its stages and shows you the stretch where your own money is funding somebody’s roof.
How it gets used
- Set the two boxes at the top first. Your margin, your average job. Every row on the page is built on them, and until they’re in, a seat only shows what it costs.
- One card per seat, not per man. A crew’s whole pay goes on the crew’s card. Ask your bookkeeper what payroll actually costs you on top of wages — that’s the burden — and put 0 for a sub crew.
- Read the monthly cost before anything else. That’s the number you’re signing up for every month, in January as well as June.
- Then the jobs a month, and the cash. If the jobs you’re turning away don’t reach it, the seat isn’t a hiring problem yet — it’s a selling problem, and the first salesman might be the seat you’re actually looking at.
- Run two or three seats side by side. A fourth crew and a first salesman answer very differently, and the box up top adds up what filling every one of them costs.
The seat this sheet can’t score
A production manager sells nothing.
So leave the weeks-to-paid and the jobs-turned-away boxes empty on his card. The page won’t hand you a verdict and it shouldn’t — read the total monthly cost alone. That is the number he has to beat in callbacks you stop eating, jobs that stop sitting, and hours handed back to you. The production manager play is where that gets decided.
Want it in a spreadsheet?
The same sheet as a spreadsheet
the-next-hire-math-sheet.xlsx is this sheet as a spreadsheet — same five formulas, same two boxes up top — for the computer at the office. Three differences in the page’s favour: the file carries the formulas on seven rows and then stops, where a seat typed on row 13 gets no math and this page holds as many as you want to weigh; words typed into a money box are said out loud here, where the file reads them as nothing and the seat quietly costs less than it does; and the file ships an example row you have to delete first, where here the example is only faint placeholder text. Two the other way: the file is a real file, so it survives a cleared browser and prints for the meeting with your bookkeeper — and its notes block sits right under the rows, where you’re typing. The sheets ask for your email once; this page never does.
The play behind it — M1-08 Can You Afford Another Crew? Do the Math Before You Hire It — is where the math comes from, and the sheet notes spell out every column and formula.