"It’s a drug and we’re hooked!” is what I said to my brother, Richie, about the fix I felt we got from doing the really big monster commercial and residential jobs for what we felt were lots of dollars. The reality is once we learned to track these jobs better and better, we realized that they tended to generate little to no profit or sometimes even a loss.
Some of that was because we weren’t as good at getting paid for change orders as we thought we were. Also, we allowed ourselves to get squeezed on price initially because we wanted to stay busy with jobs to pay for the lights in our building and keep our staff working. After all, we figured we charged enough; there had to be money at the end of it all.