Rank jobs by the hours they consume, not the invoices they carry
Two kitchens can post the same job margin and be nothing alike: one moved through the CNC in a day, the other tied up the booth for a week of finish revisions. Divide each job's margin by the shop-hours it consumed and the ranking rewrites itself — the flattering big-ticket commission often yields less per hour than the plain builder run that never touched the booth twice. A shop full of low-yield hours is busy and broke at the same time. We compute margin per shop-hour from the job cards our End-to-End Accounting service keeps current, and quoting starts pricing the hours, not just the sheets.
Channel mix is a decision, not a drift
Builder programs, designer trade accounts and direct retail feed the same benches with very different money, and most shops slide into their mix one phone call at a time. The CFO job is to hold the three side by side and choose:
| Channel | What it pays like | What it does to the shop |
|---|---|---|
| Builder programs | Volume and repeat orders at thin, negotiated margins, on the builder's terms and holdback schedule | Fills the CNC evenly and smooths payroll — while concentrating risk in a handful of accounts |
| Designer trade | Trade pricing on high-spec work with long drawing loops and finish changes | Strong margin per job, heavy drawing and booth hours per dollar |
| Direct retail | Full margin, funded by deposits and draws as the job runs | Lumpy demand that has to justify the showroom and the sales time it consumes |
None of the three is wrong. What is wrong is a mix nobody chose — builder volume quietly crowding out retail until the shop has become a high-throughput, low-margin plant no one meant to build. A concentration limit per builder account belongs in the plan the same way it would in a lender's covenant.
Shop drawings: the hours are measured — now price them
The job cards already log design and engineering time; the CFO question is what to do about it. The workable answers are a design retainer credited against the order, a stated drawing fee on builder and designer packages with a revision limit attached, or a deliberate choice to absorb the hours into margin on channels where a fee would lose the work. Any of those can be right for a given shop. Donating unmeasured weeks of drafting to whoever asks is the only wrong one.
Whichever policy the shop picks, drawing-hour recovery becomes a standing number: hours billed or built into price, over hours logged. Watch it by channel for two quarters and the designer accounts that treat your drafting department as free become visible enough to reprice — or to release.
The second CNC, the second shift, or neither
Capacity decisions deserve the underwriting a lender would apply. Backlog coverage — months of signed work against the shop's monthly output — says whether the constraint is structural or seasonal. Utilization by work centre says whether the bottleneck is the router, the booth or the bench. And the cash test has to net out the deposit float, because money collected on undelivered jobs is not equity for a down payment. Often the cheapest capacity is a second shift or outsourced finishing rather than new iron; when the answer genuinely is a machine, Business Financing Advisory builds the lender file the way a credit desk reads it — Walla Assaf came out of banking and corporate finance, and the package shows it.
A standing meeting with four numbers on the table
Each quarter, the shop and its Fractional CFO work from the same short list: margin per shop-hour by channel, backlog coverage, drawing-hour recovery, and the capex trigger points agreed in advance — so the next machine gets bought when the numbers say so, not when the dealer calls. Install surprises feed the loop too: the second trips and remakes the job cards recorded get priced back into the channel that caused them, which is how next year's quotes stop repeating this year's apologies.
The first quarter is baseline work — job-card history turned into per-channel numbers, a capacity model by work centre, the trigger points written down. After that the meeting is short, because the questions repeat and only the answers change. The engagement is scoped and quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call, for cabinet and millwork shops across Mississauga and the GTA.
