Resources
Everything here is built around one idea: trade contractors make better decisions when they can actually see what's happening in their business. These resources are how we share what we know.
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Tom breaks down the concepts that most financial consultants either don't understand or won't explain: overhead allocation, job costing, the difference between gross margin and net profit, and why busy contractors often take home less than they should.
No production fluff. No motivational intros. Just the numbers, explained the way one contractor would explain them to another.
Featured Release, Now Available!
The book on building a trades business that actually pays you back
After two decades inside the trades, Tom Atkinson put financial principles he learned, and things he wished someone had told him earlier, into a book written specifically for self-performing contractors.
It's not a business school primer. It's a field guide for the electrician, plumber, or HVAC contractor who's tired of working harder for the same result and wants to understand where the money is actually going.
The Growth Paradox
Revenue is up, crews are busy, and the phone is ringing but net profit is flat (or worse). The Growth Paradox is what happens when a business grows its volume without growing its visibility. More jobs doesn't mean more profit. It means more places for money to disappear.
The Liar, The Thief
Gross margin is a liar, it can tell you a job was profitable when it wasn't and it takes money out of your pocket in ways your current reporting can't show you. In many cases, a business can look healthy on paper and be quietly bleeding underneath.
The Three Pricing Questions
Every bid should be developed around three separate questions. What do you have to charge to cover your total costs? What can you charge based on the market? And what should you charge given everything you know about this particular job, customer, and service line? Most contractors only ever answer one of the three.
Net Profit by Dimension
True profitability isn't a single number at the bottom of a P&L. It's a picture by job, customer, service line, location, salesperson, and project manager. Net Profit by Dimension is the practice of measuring profitability at every level that matters, so the decisions about what work to take — and not take — are grounded in something real.
selective excellece
The operating philosophy behind everything Trades Alignment does. We don’t encourage more jobs, we want better jobs. Not more revenue but more durable profit. Selective excellence is the discipline of saying no to the work that doesn't serve the business, so the work that does gets the attention it deserves.
Read More About Our Core Concepts
These are the core concepts that shape how Trades Alignment thinks about trades profitability. Understanding them is the first step toward seeing your business differently.
In-depth reads on the problems most contractors never see coming
The articles here go deeper than the homepage. Each one is built around a specific problem — how overhead gets misallocated, why job costing is usually incomplete, what the Three Pricing Questions actually reveal — written for contractors who want to understand the mechanics, not just the headline.