The math, shown
You have seen the number on a manufacturer flyer or heard it at a trade show. One system a week, three hundred thousand dollars a year. It sounds like the kind of thing somebody made up in a marketing meeting.
Short answer: the arithmetic is real, and it is more boring than it sounds. Forty-three systems at seven thousand dollars each is $301,000. That is it. That is the whole calculation. Nobody is hiding anything.
What the flyer does not tell you is what has to be true in your business for those forty-three systems to actually happen, and that $300,000 is revenue, not profit. This page covers both.
Every version of this claim you will hear is built from the same three inputs. Here they are, out loud.
So the claim is not a forecast and it is not a promise. It is one multiplication, and it is correct. The real question is not whether the arithmetic works. It is whether your company sells forty-three of anything a year that it is not selling today.
Four things stand between the multiplication and the deposit. None of them are secret. Most companies miss on the second one.
This is the one condition most plumbing companies already meet and do not realize they meet. If your techs are running service calls every day, the homes are not the problem. You are standing in the opportunity and driving away from it.
This is where the number dies in most shops. A tech who mentions water quality on one call in five has quietly cut the claim by eighty percent before close rate ever enters the picture. Consistency of the offer matters more than skill at the offer.
Not fifty percent. Not ninety. A technician working the process daily has a close rate that starts low and moves. The table below is built on rates that a real person can hit in a real house, and it gets more honest the lower you set it.
Forty-three installs a year is roughly one a week of truck and tech time. Sell more than you can install and the number turns into a scheduling problem and a pile of unhappy customers. Capacity is part of the math, not an afterthought.
Set your truck count and pick a close rate. This tells you whether you clear the $300,000 headline and by how much you miss or beat it.
These are Roger Wakefield's expectations for a technician working the process daily. They are not a projection of your results, or of anyone else's. The arithmetic is shown so you can argue with it.
Most training math picks one close rate and holds it forever, as though a technician in year three is no better than the week he got back from class. That is not how anybody learns anything. The year one number here is the floor being underwritten, not the return being bought, and it is only honest because the floor is set low.
| Stage | Close rate | Systems / yr | 1 truck | 5 trucks | Gross profit @ 35% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Out of the class | 5% | 39 | $273,000 | $1,365,000 | $95,550 |
| Inside a year | 10% | 78 | $546,000 | $2,730,000 | $191,100 |
| A couple of years in | 20% | 156 | $1,092,000 | $5,460,000 | $382,200 |
Notice the first row. A single truck at a five percent close rate lands at $273,000, which is just under the $300,000 headline. So the flyer number is roughly what one technician does in his first year if he works the process every day. It is not a fleet number and it is not a stretch goal. It is the starting line.
A number is only worth something if you know what it leaves out. Here is what these figures are not.
Revenue. It is forty-three systems multiplied by a $7,000 installed price. Your gross profit depends on what you pay for equipment and what you pay to install it. At a thirty-five percent gross margin, $273,000 of revenue is $95,550 of gross profit, and overhead and payroll still come out of that.
It is the midpoint of HALO's $6,000 to $8,000 installed price to the homeowner. That is the number the customer pays, not your dealer cost. Every figure on this page uses $7,000 so the arithmetic stays checkable.
It is deliberately set low. Five percent means nineteen out of twenty homeowners say no and you still land thirty-nine systems, because a service company is in front of a lot of houses. A rate that low is easy to beat and hard to argue with, which is the point of putting it first.
One. The first row of the table is a single truck. Trucks multiply the number, they do not unlock it. A one-truck shop and a twenty-truck shop run the same process; the difference is how many times a day somebody has the conversation.
It assumes your company installs them, whoever does the wrenching. Install capacity is one of the four conditions on this page for that reason. Selling more systems than you can schedule turns a revenue number into a backlog problem.
Because a number you can hit is worth more than a number that impresses you. The year one figure is the floor being underwritten. If the floor is honest, everything above it is a real conversation instead of a sales pitch.
Written by Roger Wakefield, Texas Master Plumber
45 years in the trade, LEED AP accredited and Green Plumbing Certified. Published , last reviewed . More about Roger
The process that turns a service call into a water treatment conversation is what takes three days to learn. That is what the tour is.