When I started in this industry in 2002, nobody handed me a pricing formula. I didn't have a mentor. I didn't have a business background. What I had was the person who trained me, and his advice was simple. "Add three to five hundred dollars to the cost of a house of blinds. That'll keep you competitive."

So that's what I did. For years.

If I sold three to five jobs a week, I was making what felt like great money. I was a young guy running my own thing, and the money was coming in. I figured I had it figured out.

I didn't.

Outrunning Overhead

The formula worked when it was just me. The problem started when we grew.

We added sales reps. We added installers. We added office staff. We rented a building. And the whole time, my answer to every cost increase was the same. Sell more jobs. I thought if three hundred to five hundred dollars per job was working at five jobs a week, it would just keep working at ten, then twenty, then thirty.

We tried to outrun our overhead by selling more jobs.

It's the kind of thinking that sounds right until you actually do the math. And I wasn't doing any math. Back then I didn't even know what a P&L was. I didn't have a bookkeeper. I'd never heard the word.

The way I measured the business was simple. How much cash was in the bank. How much our suppliers were asking for that week. Could we make payroll on Friday. That was the whole dashboard.

The bigger we got, the less I was making. I could feel it but I couldn't see it. I didn't know where to look. I didn't know what questions to ask. The stress of that situation was intense. I'd lay awake at night running numbers in my head that I didn't have the framework to actually understand.

I was running a blind business blind.

I've since met enough dealers to know how common that was. It wasn't a personal failing. The system didn't have anywhere to surface what I needed to see.

Where the system finally shows you →

Unlock #1: I Could Charge More

The first lesson didn't come fast. It came slow, over years.

Little by little, I started to realize that I could charge more. A lot more. And customers would still buy.

The thing is, it wasn't just me telling myself people were price sensitive. Everyone in the industry told me the same thing. Every other dealer. Every conversation at a vendor workshop. Every guy who had been doing this longer than me. The whole industry agreed on it. People are price sensitive. You have to stay competitive. Don't get greedy.

I had never met anyone who contradicted that. But I'd also never met a wealthy blind guy.

That's worth sitting with. The same people repeating the advice were the ones not winning at this business. I just didn't see it at the time.

People weren't as price sensitive as I had convinced myself they were. Yes, some compared my price to a competitor. Yes, some asked for a discount. But most of them bought anyway, even when I held my ground.

I had to learn to justify my price without lowering it. That was the skill. That was unlock number one.

When I started setting a higher price and holding it, everything got better. I made a better living without selling any more jobs. My days got less stressful. I could hire better people. I could take better care of my customers. The same number of jobs, priced correctly, changed the whole business.

But I still didn't understand the structure underneath it. I just knew I could charge more.

I Studied the Wrong Thing

When I realized I could charge more, I got obsessed with sales.

Holding my price had improved my life so much that I figured selling was the answer to everything. So I poured myself into it. I read the books. I studied the systems. I worked on the language, the close, the objections, the follow up. I spent years getting better at selling, and it paid off. I got better at it every year.

What I didn't do was look at the finances underneath any of it.

Earlier in my career, I had built the business up to about 15 to 20 people and had to downsize to survive. It was that difficult. Years later, after unlock number one, I tried to scale again. This time was better. The pricing was stronger, the team was better, the work was cleaner. But the real challenges didn't show up until I got large again.

Even though I was making good money, I started to feel like I had hit a ceiling. The harder I pushed, the less the income moved. Something underneath the business wasn't working, and I couldn't see it because I had spent all those years studying the wrong thing.

I had gotten really good at the top of the funnel. I had no idea what was happening at the bottom of the P&L.

Unlock #2: The P&L

The second unlock came at a conference. And it's worth saying upfront. It wasn't an industry conference.

In our industry, I had never heard anyone talk about profit. Not once. The conferences I'd been attending for years were all sales conferences. More jobs. Higher close rates. Bigger sales. Those are real skills, and I was glad to learn them. But I never sat in a room where someone walked through a P&L and explained how the math actually had to work. That conversation was happening somewhere else, and I hadn't gone looking for it.

I had heard about a different kind of conference on a podcast. The Top 500 Remodelers conference. It was for home improvement and remodeling business owners. Plumbers, roofers, contractors, the people who actually had to figure out how to run a profitable trade business. The whole thing was built around the idea that the people doing the work deserved to actually make a living, and that required understanding the business behind the business.

I decided to go. I was the only person from my industry at the event. Not one other window covering guy in the room. Looking back, that tells you everything about why our industry was stuck where it was. Nobody from the blinds world was looking outside the blinds world for answers.

I sat in two workshops back to back. The first was led by a man named Charlie Gindele. He had spent decades in home improvement, built a remodeling business into something significant, and written a book called Lessons Learned: My Journey From Contractor to Businessman. I ordered the book from the show and read it the moment I got home.

For the first time in my career, the words started to mean something. Revenue. Cost of goods sold. Gross profit. Overhead. Net profit. I had been running a company for years without knowing how those pieces fit together. Charlie laid it out in plain language, the way somebody who had actually lived it would. It wasn't a textbook. It was a guy telling the truth about how a real business actually works.

The second workshop was led by Jim. Jim had run a doors and windows business for years and knew what it took to keep a home improvement company actually profitable. His talk was about balance. He explained that each major piece of a P&L has to stay in proportion if you want a healthy business.

Then he said the line that stopped me cold.

You can't let your material cost go above 30 percent of your P&L. And ideally, you want it under 20.

That was shocking to me. I sat there thinking it was impossible. There was no way. Not in my business, not at the prices I was charging, not the way the industry worked. I had been operating my whole career with material cost eating up way more than that, and I didn't even know it.

When I went home and for the first time really dug into my numbers, I realized he was right. It was impossible. At least, it was impossible the way I had built the business.

But it was also the most important thing I was ever going to have to figure out how to do.

The Month That Changed Everything

I spent weeks on the P&L. Pulling the numbers apart. Looking at how we bought. Looking at how we sold. Looking at every category and what percentage of the business it was eating. For the first time in my career, I understood what the words margin and markup actually meant, and how those two things had been quietly running the business while I wasn't watching.

Every line told the same story. Material cost was way over where Jim said it had to be. Way over. And the more I looked, the more I understood why my income had hit a ceiling. The math was working against me on every single job, and I had been trying to fix it by selling more.

That month was the turning point. I realized I was going to have to make some very hard changes. I wasn't going to be able to fix this with one decision or one new policy. I was going to have to systematically go through every part of the company and transform what we were doing. How we priced. How we bought. How we structured every line of the P&L.

That was the real unlock. Not just learning what a P&L was. Realizing that I had built a whole business on top of a math problem I had never solved.

Two Sides of the Same Lesson

Looking back, the two unlocks are really the same lesson seen from two angles.

Unlock number one was about the top of the P&L. The price you charge. Most owners in the trades undercharge because they're afraid to hold their price, and they spend their whole career trying to make it up on volume.

Unlock number two was about the structure underneath that price. The cost side. The percentages. The balance that has to exist between what you bring in and what you spend to deliver the work.

You need both. If you charge correctly but your cost structure is broken, you still go backwards. If your cost structure is clean but you're undercharging, you still go backwards. The two work together, and most of us in this industry were never taught either one.

What I'd Tell a New Owner

If someone walked into my office tomorrow and told me they were starting a blinds company, I would tell them this.

Don't price off your competitors. Don't price off the manufacturer's retail guide. Both of those will lead you to the same place I ended up. Working harder every year and making less.

Learn to read a P&L before you hire your first person. Get a bookkeeper before you think you need one. Know what your material cost is as a percentage of your revenue. Know your overhead. Know what's left.

And learn to hold your price. Most of the people asking for a discount will buy from you anyway. The ones who won't were never going to be good customers.

I ran a blind business blind for too many years. I don't want anyone else to have to do the same.