Service Business Grader
Answer 10 quick questions across pricing, marketing, scheduling, retention, and financials to see where your business stands.
Pricing
Your grade
Your score will appear here
Answered 0 of 10 questions.
Fix what's holding you back
Build With UsThe Service Business Grader gives contractors and service companies a fast read on how the business is run — not just what it earns.
Instead of asking you to pull financial statements, it walks through ten short questions about how you actually operate: how you set prices, where leads come from, how you schedule, how you keep customers, and how closely you watch the numbers. It turns those answers into a score out of 100 and points you at what to fix first.
How the Service Business Grader Works
The grader scores you across five areas that decide whether a service business is healthy and hard to compete with:
- Pricing — whether your rates are calculated to cover overhead and profit, and how often you revisit them.
- Marketing — where new customers come from, and whether you track which channels actually pay.
- Scheduling — how you dispatch jobs and how fast you respond to a new request.
- Retention — whether you have a system for repeat business, and how much revenue comes from returning customers.
- Financials — whether you track revenue, cost, and margin regularly, and know your true break-even rate.
Each area has two questions, and each answer is worth 2, 6, or 10 points. Your score in a category is the average of its two answers, scaled to 100, and your overall grade is the average across all five. Your two lowest categories come back with a specific next step, not just a number — so the result tells you where to start.
Nothing is saved, so you can retake it after making changes and watch the score move.
Why Grade Your Service Business
Regular self-assessment beats running on assumptions.
Checking these five areas even once a year surfaces the things that quietly erode a business — prices that never moved as costs rose, leads you can't attribute, a scheduling system held together by memory, an over-reliance on one-time jobs. A consistent scorecard turns "we should probably fix that" into a ranked list of where the next improvement will do the most good.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Service Business Grader measure?
How you run the business day to day across five areas: pricing, marketing, scheduling, retention, and financials. It's an operational read, not a financial audit — you answer questions about your systems, not your spreadsheets.
Is this scientific?
No — it's a quick self-assessment to surface where to look first, not a formal audit. Its value is in the ranking: it tells you which area is costing you the most right now.
Why is recurring revenue important?
Repeat customers and maintenance agreements give predictable income, smoother cash flow, and less exposure to seasonal or one-off work — which is why retention is one of the five categories scored.
Can small businesses use the Service Business Grader?
Yes — it fits any size and trade, from a solo contractor to a large service company. The five areas matter the same way whether you're HVAC, plumbing, electrical, or roofing. When you're ready to put a number on what you've built, try the Business Valuation Calculator.
Build the tools your trade needs.
Dalton Mills gives people in the trades the opportunity to create custom workflows and software tools without any prior technical experience.
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