The following story is a preview from an upcoming book about how commercial service contractors can earn “money for nothing” by rethinking the way that they present and deliver the services that they provide their customers.

I am amazed at how often I see service contractors spending extraordinary effort to measure the gross margin of each service call, job, or project to two decimal places while simultaneously making zero effort whatsoever to measure and understand the value of their business in total. Service call gross margin is a very poor proxy measurement for the overall value of the business to its shareholders.

Any financial calculation of investment value is always about the current value of a future stream of income. The more certain and less volatile that future stream of income, the higher the premium that can be paid today to own that future income – i.e. to become a shareholder. For a service contractor, optimizing this value is all about having a large set of somewhat diverse customers that spend predictable amounts of money each year for the maintenance, monitoring, repair, and upfit of their important equipment. It is also about having a sales approach that regularly adds new customers to the portfolio while simultaneously having high customer satisfaction levels so that few customers ever terminate the relationship.

So what questions should you be asking as a shareholder to determine the value of a commercial service contracting business (or any other high value, maintenance or subscription-oriented business)? Here are a few ideas to get you started. Let’s see how you do in answering these:

• How many customers do you have under an annual or longer maintenance contract?
• What is the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) or annual recurring revenue (ARR) for the set of customers that have a maintenance contract?
• What is the total contract value (TCV) of future committed revenue for all customers under contract?
• What is the annual contract value (ACV) expected to become revenue in the next twelve months?
• What is the amount of deferred revenue on the balance sheet that reflects payments collected in advance for services to be delivered in the future? What is the ratio of this number to the ACV number above? To the TCV number above? The higher these ratios, the more committed the customers are to your contracts.
• What is the ratio of planned work revenue (maintenance, inspections, quoted repairs) to unplanned work revenue (emergency or priority service calls where something broke)? The higher this ratio the better the customer service being delivered. Customers do not like unplanned expenses nor the disruptions they represent.
• How much does it cost in sales and marketing expense to land a new customer (the cost to acquire a customer or CAC)? What is the ratio of that cost to the first year average revenue from a new customer?
• What is the net revenue churn in the customer base? How much revenue did you get this year from customers that have been with you for over a year relative to the revenue from those customers for the prior year? Minimal churn means your digital wrap is sticky.
• What is your contract renewal rate? What percentage of customers do not renew their maintenance plan when it comes due? How much annual contract revenue on average do these non-renewing customers represent? These numbers represent your gross churn.

All of these questions are directly correlated with the value of a service contracting business (or any subscription-oriented business for that matter), and not one of them deals directly with the question of gross margin for a service call. Service call gross margin is important, but gross margin on contract maintenance, inspections, and planned repairs is actually much more important. No investor will complain about an occasional expense hiccup for unplanned services in the context of a highly predictable stream of high margin, contract service fees. The very nature of unplanned work (it is unplanned!) makes it volatile and not particularly valuable to an investor.

So what is the formula for managing the business toward the highest return for the owners of the business? If service call gross margin is the wrong metric, what are the right metrics? And how can they be measured regularly to assure the business strategy is generating high shareholder returns?

As I indicated above, the basic finance formula for determining the value of an investment is to assess the amount and the risk of future income streams. Of course, predicting the future is tricky business, so it is best to rely on historical trends as a proxy for future performance, along with a healthy dose of common sense. With that in mind, I have developed a simple, easy to remember mantra for service contractors to keep in mind as they consider strategic initiatives to increase the value of the business:

How Many? How Much? How Long?

These three questions underpin the basic value-building fundamentals for almost any business.

A continuation of this chapter with tactical examples of how to measure “How many? How much? How long?” is included in our How Valuable Is Your Brand? Part 2.

You can also check out Billy’s previous post on this topic: What’s your company worth?