You would not run a truck without gauges. But most service business owners run their entire company without knowing five numbers that are far more predictive of where the business is going than revenue ever will be.
Why revenue is the wrong number to watch
Revenue tells you what happened. It does not tell you whether your business is healthy or quietly bleeding. A company can show record revenue in October and be functionally insolvent by February if the underlying metrics are pointing the wrong direction. The owners who get surprised by that have been watching the top line and missing everything underneath it.
The five metrics below are what HomePro OS tracks in the Finance module — not because they are interesting, but because they are the ones that predict what happens next.
1. Close rate
Close rate is the percentage of estimates you write that turn into signed jobs. A healthy close rate for most residential trades sits between 40% and 60% on inbound leads; commercial work typically runs lower. If your close rate is below 30%, one of three things is true: your prices are significantly above market, your follow-up is breaking down, or you are writing estimates for unqualified leads. Each has a different fix.
Most owners know roughly what their close rate is. Few track it month over month with enough precision to notice when it starts slipping — which is when the information is actually useful.
2. Cash runway
Cash runway is how many months your business can continue operating at its current expense rate if all revenue stopped tomorrow. The standard benchmark is three months. Below two months, you are in risk territory for any disruption — a slow season, an equipment failure, a key person departure. Above six months, you likely have capital sitting idle that could be working harder.
Cash runway is the difference between a business that can afford to wait out a slow February and one that takes on bad-margin jobs because it has no choice. It is worth calculating monthly, not annually when the accountant visits.
3. Review velocity
Review velocity is the rate at which new Google reviews are accumulating on your listing. It matters for two reasons: Google's local ranking algorithm heavily weights recency and volume of reviews, and customers researching contractors actively compare review counts. A company with 40 reviews and 3 new ones per month looks different to Google — and to a homeowner — than a company with 400 reviews and 0 new ones per month.
A healthy target for most residential trades is 2 to 5 new reviews per month per active crew. If you are closing 15 jobs a month and getting 1 review, you have a process gap. Automated review requests sent 2 to 4 hours after job completion can shift that ratio dramatically without adding any manual effort.
4. Team retention score
Technician turnover is one of the most expensive and least-tracked costs in a service business. The fully-loaded cost of replacing a field tech — recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity during ramp, and the jobs that do not go as smoothly while someone new is learning — typically runs between 50% and 75% of annual salary. For a $60,000 tech, that is $30,000 to $45,000 per departure.
Team retention score in HomePro OS is a composite of leading indicators: how often technicians are hitting their performance targets, whether they are getting consistent feedback, and how their job satisfaction signals (response time, attendance, upsell rate trends) are trending. Retention problems usually announce themselves three months before a resignation. The data is there if anyone is looking at it.
5. Business valuation
Most service business owners have no idea what their business would sell for today, and most do not think about it until they are ready to exit. That is a mistake. Business valuation is not just a number for the eventual sale. It is a score that reflects the health of the entire enterprise.
Service businesses are typically valued at 2 to 4 times EBITDA with multiplier adjustments for recurring revenue, customer concentration, systems documentation, and key-person dependency. A business with a predictable recurring revenue base (maintenance agreements, service contracts), documented systems, and no single customer representing more than 15% of revenue commands the high end. An owner-dependent business with no contracts commands the low end.
Knowing your valuation today gives you a target to optimize against. Which of the adjustments would move you from a 2x multiple to a 3x? That is often the highest-leverage question in the business.
Tracking them without a finance team
HomePro OS pulls these five metrics automatically from your connected data — your CRM, your job management tool, your bank feeds, your Google Business Profile, and your payroll system. You do not need a controller or a monthly financial review to know where you stand. The OS surfaces these numbers in a dashboard that updates in real time, flags when any metric is moving the wrong direction, and tells you what changed.
Most owners who connect HomePro discover two to four cash leaks in the first 30 days that they had not known were there. Not because the data was hidden — because no one had organized it into a single view before.