Hey all this may be a long post but I’m in a bit of disarray.

I started a service based business 6 months ago with no money invested other than paying for business registration. In that time we have been steadily growing and this month we hit $100k total revenue.

My problem this… 6 months ago when it was just me I would go install a $3,000 job and come out of it with like $2,000 profit. Now that I have Google ads, employees, commercial vehicle rentals, more subscriptions to things, and etc- that same $3,000 job would only net $200 or less and that $200 goes straight to the overhead.

The problem I’m facing is I have to make a 50% profit margin for the business to continue to grow and me to get paid for bills (I’m working 14 hour days 7 days a week and getting paid like $200 a week- one of my employees gets paid $1300 a week for reference).

When I take all the costs for a job (labor, rentals, material costs, etc) and multiply it for 50% margin my costs greatly exceed competitions costs. The only reason why is because I pay my employees x2 what competition pays (for retention and care for the work), I use the highest grade materials and don’t cheap out or cut corners, and I invest in Google ads aggressively for more leads. Due to this, my sales closing rate has dropped from 45% to 25%, and I still need to charge more because the costs just keep going up.

For reference the last 3 jobs we installed costed a total of $17,500 and I only netted like $3,500 for 9 days of work.

What should I do, keep increasing costs or just take the profit loss and operate and a slim margin? Thank you!

Edit: x2 employee pay just means $22 an hour vs competition paying $11 an hour which is why they have huge turnover. I feel as though I should pay more than Walmart ($17-$20) since this is outside in the heat work and Walmart offers AC. Also I have had 0 turnover so far and the employees are passionate about the work due to the pay and how I take care of them.

Edit 2: my problem could just be volume at this point from how a few people have pointed things out. If I had 3 crews installing a project a day I’d be netting $1,800 profit vs right now I’m at one crew with like ~$400- $600 profit a day (which goes into overhead investments like ramping up marketing and better tools for quicker installations).