You’re doing the hours.
The phone’s ringing.
The skips are out.
The yard’s rammed.
But the profit? Still missing in action.
If that sounds like your business, you’re not alone. A lot of waste firms are stuck in the same trap: working harder than ever, yet somehow worse off than before.
So what’s going on?
More jobs, same hole
When profits tank, the first reaction is usually “we need more sales.”
It feels like the answer. Fill the diary, fill the skips, fill the bank.
But if every job is already under-priced, inefficient, or poorly managed, then more jobs just make the hole deeper. You’re scaling failure.
That’s not growth. That’s self-harm in a hi-vis vest.
Check the leaks before you pour more in
Imagine filling a leaking skip with champagne. You can keep pouring, but it’ll still be empty.
Your problem isn’t lack of work. It’s the silent bleed underneath:
- Jobs that look profitable on paper but never quite deliver.
- Clients who eat time but pay late.
- Wages and overtime that balloon when things get “busy.”
- Disposal costs that rise faster than your prices.
Until you plug those leaks, chasing sales is just turning up the volume on a broken amp.
Go hunting in your own P&L
Forget the sales drive for a week.
Grab a torch and go rat-hunting in your own accounts:
- Which customers or contracts actually make money?
- What work is killing cashflow?
- Where are you subsidising inefficiency because it’s “how we’ve always done it”?
Be brutal. Kill what doesn’t pay. Simplify what does.
Then go and sell that.
Because sales is an amplifier. And if your business is broken, it just makes the noise louder.
The bottom line
If you’re working harder but earning less, it’s not a sales problem.
It’s a pricing, process, and discipline problem.
Get those right, and every new sale becomes profit.
Ignore them, and you’re just rearranging deckchairs on your own skip fire.
And if you need a hand stopping cash bleeding from your business, you know where to find me.
