Forgewright

Before you hire anybody, including us

Find out what your business is capable of.

Eleven questions, five minutes, no email required. It gives you a number and shows you every calculation, so you can argue with it. It is an estimate from benchmarks, not a finding — and if it comes back small, your business is running well and you don't need us. That is a real outcome, and we would rather you found it here than paid us to tell you.

Question 1 of 11

Which of these is closest to what you do?

The eight checks are built for job-based economics. If yours are not, this instrument is not tuned to you and it will say so rather than guess.

Revenue for the last twelve months.

Rough is fine. No figure you type here is stored or sent anywhere — the whole calculation runs in this browser window. We count how far people get and which revenue band and trade they were in, so we know whether the tool works. Never a figure, never a name.

How many full-time-equivalent people, including you?

Count two half-timers as one. This is never turned into a dollar figure. It sets a flag and nothing else.

Gross margin last full year — after job costs, before overhead. And how do you know that number?

The second answer matters as much as the first. More often than not it is the finding.

Contract value of the jobs you actually completed in those twelve months.

Completed — not sold, not booked. Every dollar line below is measured against this figure and not against revenue.

In those twelve months: how many jobs did you bid, and how many did you win?

The best count you have. If there is no bid register to count from, leave both blank — that absence is itself a finding, and one of the cheapest there is to fix.

Change orders and extra work are…

When were the books last closed?

No dollar figure comes off this answer. We could not source a rate for deciding on stale numbers, so we took it out.

Business and personal money, and the paperwork.

When was the insurance programme last gone through line by line — not just renewed?

This one is a flag with no dollar attached, deliberately. The reason is on the result page.

How many consecutive days off did you take last year — and if you were unreachable next week, could the business price a job correctly without you?

Estimated, per year

$0
See what to do next

This is an estimate, not a finding. It is built from published benchmark ranges and the numbers you typed, and it is not covered by the guarantee. In a real Build Plan every dollar traces to a document you handed over, and a figure like the one above would be marked estimated and would not count toward it.

Where it comes from

Three lines. Every one shows its arithmetic, and the zeros say why they are zero.

The bigger number we didn't show you.

The same margin gap, measured to the top of the healthy band instead of to the concerning line.

Twenty-five per cent is the top of the healthy band; twenty-two sits in the middle of it, not at the edge. Measuring to it anyway is how these numbers get inflated, and we publish the same subtraction in every real report — the sample Build Plan strikes $94,638 off its own first pass, on the page, for exactly this reason.

What is on the line

Structure, coverage, visibility and owner dependence — reported as tiers, never as dollars, and never added to the number above.

Two things we could have put a number on, and didn't.

Insurance. We could estimate your premium as a percentage of revenue and multiply it by a market overpay range. Our own benchmark file forbids it: a market range never overrides your own arithmetic, and we have not seen your premium. It stays a flag.

Deciding on stale numbers. The old version of this tool charged 0.5–1.5% of revenue for books that are months behind. We cannot source that rate to anything, so we removed it. Books three months behind are a red line and a flag, not a dollar.

The same rule covers the rest of the panel above: structure, coverage, owner dependence and revenue per head are tiers, never dollars. And one more thing worth saying plainly — self-reported gross margin is wrong more often than it is right, usually optimistic, because unpriced extras and rework rarely make it into the cost. A paid Diagnostic checks that figure against your records instead of accepting it, which can move the result either way.

Three things you can check yourself this week.

Free, and worth doing whether or not you ever write in.

  1. Pull your last eight closed jobs and put sold margin next to final margin on one sheet. If the gap is wider than three points on more than two of them, you have found the thing this page was estimating.
  2. Count how many change orders in the last year were signed before the work started. Not captured eventually — signed first. The ratio is the number.
  3. Run the ten-minute check in the field note. It is one report, read one way, and it is the cheapest thing on this list.
Read the field note See a finished Build Plan

Or ring me and argue with the number: (615) 283-0811.