Double Your Profit Day #4 Non-Negotiable Budgets = Real Results

I'm John Wilson, and I'm the CEO of the Wilson Companies in Ohio. We are a plumbing, HVAC, and electrical contractor that will do about $30 million in 2025. Thanks for joining us for the Double Your Profit series, where we spend 30 days diving deep into the action steps that you can take to double the profit for your business. Thanks for tagging along. Welcome back to Double Your Profit. Today we're talking about why arbitrary budgets make your business stronger. When you're setting budgets, one of your goals should be setting hardline budgets with zero negotiation. I'm going to spend $10,000 a month on this line item, and if it goes a penny over that, then we're going to have an issue, or the credit card will bounce. Often you can set exact dollar amounts with your credit card system that allows it to bounce any costs past that point. The reason to do this is twofold. One, it creates accountability, but two, tightness breeds creativity. I had a friend out here 2 months ago. He's a much larger business than we are, and I asked him why he was out here, and he said smaller businesses are more innovative because they have to be. And they have to figure out how to do more with less. If you're a smaller business today doing $1, $2, $5 million, you probably have stuff figured out that I don't have figured out. And the reason is because I don't have to have it figured out. And that's not a flex, I think that's embarrassing. I should be working hard to figure out how to do stuff the same way that smaller businesses are doing it because they're running tighter ships than I am because they have to run tighter ships than I do. I can afford to be a little bit more loose whereas they can't and that breeds A lack of creativity. Tight budgets also force teams to really get aligned on what matters and what doesn't. Like, hey, I need another $10,000 for this thing. Well, is that $10,000 gonna actually move the needle or is it just $10,000? What we want to happen is we want our budgets, these hardline budgets, to match the actual strategy. Hey, we went into the year saying we wanted to grow 30%, we wanted marketing to do this, this hire was important to us. So your $5,000 request that came out of the blue or $10,000 request that came out of the blue is not important. It might be urgent, but to the long-term strategy of where we're trying to go with our business, this is going to be a detriment and potentially get in the way of the things that we actually need to do. My final note on this is review often and adapt as needed. Ideally, budget shrink. At the end of April this year, we actually were able to shrink a portion of our budget because we've been creative enough to keep reducing the amount of spend that went through those line items, and it was a win. If we didn't continue doing that, we would have just blown what could have been potential profit and never gained it. If you like the series so far, Give us a like and hit the sub button.