The Boat That Was Taking on Water

When I was younger, I remember being out on a boat. The motor was running, we were moving, the sun was out — everything looked fine. But every so often someone would quietly lean down and scoop water out with a bucket. No panic. No announcement. Just scooping.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it. The boat was still moving forward.

Over the last 10 months in business, that memory has come back to me. From the outside, we’ve looked busy — installers working most days, quotes going out, jobs accepted, customers happy. The boat was moving. But behind the scenes, it felt like we were always scooping water. Cash felt tighter than it should have, and profit didn’t reflect the effort going in.

So we slowed down and looked at the numbers properly. Not roughly. Not “she’ll be right.” Properly.

What became clear was uncomfortable. We weren’t leaking because the work was bad, and we weren’t leaking because there weren’t enough jobs. We were leaking because of how we thought about labour.

For years, like many flooring businesses, we priced by the crew — “two people for a day.” It sounds simple and logical, and it’s how a lot of us learned. But when we broke it down properly, it didn’t hold up. We weren’t pricing per installer. We weren’t pricing per real unit of labour. We weren’t consistently recovering the true cost of time on site.

Three installers for half a day isn’t “a crew.” It’s 1.5 installer-days. That shift sounds minor, but it changes everything. Once we started looking at labour in installer-days, the numbers stopped hiding from us.

We hadn’t failed. We had just been using a pricing model built in a different season — lower wages, different overhead, different expectations. A business that only needed to run, not necessarily grow.

Taking over a family business means inheriting more than systems. You inherit assumptions. And assumptions age.

That’s what this was. Not failure. Just a small hole in the bottom of a boat that still looked like it was moving.

Now when we quote a job, we don’t think in “two people for a day.” We think in installer-days. We think about true labour cost. We think about sustainability. We’ve identified the leak — now it’s just a matter of figuring out how to fix it. Because being busy is not the same as being profitable, and a boat can travel a long way while slowly taking on water. The real skill is noticing the leak early enough to start addressing it.