Bill BrownFounder of ServiceTitan Hacks community (9k+ pros) | INC 5000 Contractor | Helping contractors win with AI & Automation

EBITDA vs Revenue: What Contractors Should Know

14 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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1:04

Tommy Mello's contracting companies track EBITDA to the penny while most executives fixate on revenue. Bill Brown explains why contractors should shift to EBITDA-first thinking to make better decisions and evaluate real performance, not just top-line numbers.

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Tommy Mello is inspirational for a lot of reasons, and I'm not bringing this up just because it's him. He said a line that still sort of stuck with me, which was, uh, whenever he walked into the room, he was talking about revenue and everybody else was talking about EBITDA. I'll talk to companies 10 times my size, and they have a rough idea of what their revenue is, but they know their EBITDA to a penny. And I think contractors, it's so easy to get caught up in the revenue game, I've said it a few times here, but it's because I think most of the audience is a contractor and that's what they're going to resonate with. That was probably the biggest long-term change for us, was totally pivoting our thinking from revenue to EBITDA. And how do we think about our business? How do we talk about it? How does our senior leadership talk about it? Uh, we are today, we're an EBITDA-first business. Like, I'm not totally sure what we did in revenue last month. I know to the penny what we did in Ibiza.