The Cost of a Story
In my last post, I talked about legacy—about continuing something that’s been part of our whānau for over 30 years. But behind the legacy is the why. And this time, I want to talk about the numbers.
Stepping away from a six-figure salary wasn’t something I did lightly. That job let me work remotely, flew me around the motu and overseas a few times. It was good. Stable. Comfortable. And yet—this felt like the right move for us.
Do I miss the salary? Absolutely. That level of reliability has been a constant through most of my career. But comfort can also be a trap. We saw something here—an opportunity not just to carry something forward, but to shape it into something future-facing.
Before I even looked at the business numbers, I needed to understand our own. What would it take for us to stay afloat without full-time salaries?
So, I built a personal breakeven model—rent, food, insurance, living costs, everything. I’ve used this tool for years, so it was just a matter of tweaking it for this scenario. The goal wasn’t just to survive—it was to survive without torching everything we’d saved.
To create the breathing room we’d need, I made some hard calls. One of the biggest was shifting our mortgages to interest-only. Not ideal, but it freed up the cash we needed to get through the transition.
Once we had that benchmark, we turned to the business itself.
When we first looked at taking over, we sat down and reviewed last year’s numbers. The books showed a slim profit. Sometimes that’s strategic—especially around tax time—but it still made me uneasy.
When I pressed Dad for more detail, he just shrugged and said something like, “Yeah, it’s fine—I bought a boat last year and a few other bits.”
Classic Dad. He’s always run things on instinct and relationships—an old-school operator who backs himself. And to be fair, it’s kept the wheels turning for over three decades.
But coming from a tech background, that approach made me nervous. I’m used to decisions grounded in data—things you can track, model, and stress-test. “She’ll be right” doesn’t cut it when you’ve got a mortgage, a young whānau, and staff depending on you.
That’s when it hit me: the business wasn’t built to scale—it was built around one person.
Like many small businesses, this one was—and in many ways still is—my dad. Most people didn’t even realise the business was called P&P Contractors. We recently changed the name to reflect what we actually do: P&P Flooring Ltd.
I can imagine people just saying, “Call Poinga, he’ll sort you out.” That kind of trust and reputation is gold. It’s also a double-edged sword—because when the business is the person, you can’t scale. You get bottlenecks. Burnout. And you risk losing everything if that person steps back.
We’ve seen the weight of that up close. The stress Mum and Dad carried wasn’t just about making a living—it was about making sure everyone else could too. Being an employer doesn’t stop at payroll; it means your success impacts the livelihoods of people well beyond your whānau. That’s pressure. Real pressure.
Over the past few weeks, there’ve been moments where it felt like we were paying for the privilege of working in the business. We're now a month and a bit in, and we still haven’t taken a cent. If anything, we’ve invested more just to keep it going. We knew this was coming—early days in a business are often dry. To survive, you need liquidity. You need enough to cover bills when payments come in late.
I go through peaks and troughs of worry about the numbers, and a couple of weeks ago it hit hard.
We sat down, opened up Xero, and looked at the numbers. Rent. Wages. Power. Supplies. Phones. Outgoings were stacking up, and revenue wasn’t yet keeping pace. The weight of it landed hard. I stared at the spreadsheet thinking, What have we gotten ourselves into?
I remember thinking, This can’t all be out of my control. I needed to run the numbers and work backwards to figure out the single, urgent question: What’s our actual break-even point per job?
So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I mapped out all our fixed costs—rent, internet, phones, insurance. Then the variable ones—wages, ACC levies, materials. I reviewed old invoices and quotes, comparing what we thought a job would cost to what it actually did. It wasn’t pretty.
That process led me to build a cost-per-job calculator—something simple but powerful. You plug in the square meterage of a job, and it spits out materials, labour, and margin. You can adjust everything and see where the numbers land.
It gave me something I really needed in that moment: a sense of control.
We’ve even used the calculator on past jobs to uncover margin and pricing issues. It’s still a prototype—I’m constantly tweaking it to make it more intuitive—but already, it feels like a game changer.
This whole experience brought me back to a mental model I’ve leaned on a lot over the years: the circle of control.
What you can control: your actions, your decisions, how you respond.
What you can influence: your staff, your suppliers, your customers.
What you can’t control: interest rates, inflation, the market, the weather.
In moments of panic, it’s easy to get stuck in the outer circle—worrying about everything you can’t change. But the game shifts when you pull your energy back to the centre.
I couldn’t control the fact that we’re in start-up mode. But I could build a tool to understand our costs. I could make decisions with clearer visibility. I could choose action over anxiety.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far:
Start with your breakeven point—both personal and business.
Don’t shy away from the numbers. Ignorance isn’t bliss—it’s expensive.
Build small tools that give you clarity, even if it’s just a spreadsheet.
The more data you have, the more data-based decisions you can make.
It’s okay to freak out. Just don’t live there.
We’ve still got a long way to go. But today, we stepped a little closer to clarity. That feels like progress—and for now, that’s enough.