Operating analysis · Document 04

Job margin, contract pricing and overtime

Aspire records price and actual cost on every work ticket, so delivered margin per job is computable — and nothing in the platform computes it. This does. It also examines how consistently the price book is applied, and what overtime the system actually records.

Priced tickets: 268,702
Revenue examined: $202,639,196
Blended margin: 43%
Negative-margin work: $13,137,889
Recorded overtime: 247,883.1 h
Period: Jan – Aug 2026

Headline

$13,137,889 of work was delivered below cost

Revenue examined

$202,639,196

268,702 tickets carrying both a price and an actual cost — about 73% of all tickets.

Delivered below cost

$13,137,889

6.5% of revenue examined. Two operating companies account for four fifths of it.

Blended gross margin

43%

Ranges 26.9% to 56.6% between operating companies.

Price overridden

56.8–89%

Share of services where pricing departs from the book. Minimum-price application is near zero everywhere.

Job margin

Where margin is lost, and on what size of job

Gross margin is Price less TotalCostAct per ticket. The column that matters most is drag — blended margin minus the median. Blended is value-weighted, the median is count-weighted, so a negative drag means the large jobs carry worse margin than the typical one. That distinction decides where to look.

Tickets with both a price and an actual cost. Drag = blended minus median, in points.
Tenant	Tickets	Revenue	Blended	Median	Drag	p10	Negative	Loss
Keesen	37,806	$25,949,619	56.6%	51.2%	+5.4	-8.5%	11.7%	$834,466
Signature	63,399	$24,797,774	52.8%	52.2%	+0.6	25.7%	4%	$240,922
Heartland AZ	26,718	$32,318,288	50.2%	47%	+3.2	-13.6%	12.6%	$516,358
Merit of Texas	20,649	$14,506,784	48%	47.6%	+0.4	14.4%	6.7%	$190,882
LCM	17,040	$16,313,534	47.4%	47.3%	+0.1	12%	6.7%	$511,916
JML	25,271	$16,799,307	46.3%	44.1%	+2.2	16.8%	4.6%	$169,797
Heartland NE	53,729	$45,463,551	29.8%	40.2%	-10.4	-15.8%	13.1%	$6,167,818
Heritage Landscape Services	24,090	$26,490,340	26.9%	44.4%	-17.5	-25%	13.4%	$4,505,730

Heartland NE and Heritage are the finding. Together they carry $10,673,548 of the $13,137,889. Both show a drag of ten points or more — blended margin far below their own median — meaning the loss is concentrated in large jobs rather than spread across a long tail of small ones. That is the tractable version of this problem: a limited number of individually identifiable jobs. By contrast LCM's blended and median are within a tenth of a point, so its margin is uniform across job sizes and there is no concentration to find.

Job margin

Lowest-margin branches

Branches with at least 50 priced tickets, ranked by blended margin.
Branch	Tenant	Tickets	Revenue	Margin	Negative	Loss
J. Downend - Kennett Square	Heartland NE	568	$1,064,822	0.4%	13.2%	$439,307
OLNEY	Heritage Landscape Services	2,620	$2,445,629	2.1%	19.9%	$845,565
STAFFORD	Heritage Landscape Services	931	$955,217	12.5%	15.4%	$305,059
Sharp's - Philadelphia	Heartland NE	5,588	$4,523,218	13%	8.6%	$1,292,943
BURTONSVILLE	Heritage Landscape Services	3,836	$3,356,990	19.6%	17%	$767,011
Merit NE - Pennsylvania	Heartland NE	2,473	$1,236,739	22.5%	9.3%	$169,380
J. Downend - Ridley	Heartland NE	3,298	$3,801,639	25.7%	14.9%	$622,424
PRINCE WILLIAM	Heritage Landscape Services	5,292	$5,243,890	28.6%	11.7%	$845,778
Wilcox - Corporate	Heartland NE	10,715	$6,388,049	30.1%	24.5%	$1,230,901
THE FARM	Heritage Landscape Services	3,120	$6,215,906	30.9%	9.6%	$846,587
STERLING	Heritage Landscape Services	3,563	$4,685,384	31.1%	11.6%	$600,000
Sharp's - Bristol	Heartland NE	2,184	$1,937,562	32.2%	6%	$243,004

Contract pricing

The price book is advisory

Per tenant. Comparable services are those surviving the plausibility filter described below.
Tenant	Services	Price overridden	Minimum applied	Comparable	Excluded
Heartland NE	189,080	89%	0%	119,299	31,287
Signature	589,004	80.2%	0.6%	426,680	36,278
Keesen	466,610	79.9%	0.5%	297,618	7,454
Heartland AZ	84,963	78.7%	0.1%	69,911	3,246
LCM	144,894	74.1%	0%	122,981	4,642
Heritage Landscape Services	229,930	65.3%	1.7%	135,535	33,543
JML	106,253	64.8%	0%	90,757	10,501
Merit of Texas	54,287	56.8%	0%	38,815	1,696

Between 56.8% and 89% of services carry an overridden price, and minimum-price application is effectively unused. At the top of that range nearly nine services in ten depart from the book. This needs no filtering or interpretation: as a systematic control on pricing, the price book is not functioning.

Same service, different rate

Price per service-hour for recurring services with 30+ instances, widest interquartile spread.
Service	Tenant	Instances	p25	Median	p75	p75/p25
Sprinkler Repairs	Signature	37	$36.44	$131.26	$453.87	12.46×
Seasonal DeIce Walks	Signature	271	$38.76	$369.87	$379.85	9.8×
Growth Regulatory Tree	Merit of Texas	36	$37.15	$38.41	$257.26	6.93×
DeIce Walks	Signature	46	$57.44	$199.36	$371.45	6.47×
Spring Granular Fertilization	LCM	39	$43.14	$114.85	$227.6	5.28×
Miscellaneous Service 1	Signature	164	$34.52	$44.67	$171.49	4.97×
Commercial Plant Salvage	Heartland AZ	109	$59.02	$127.35	$291.76	4.94×
Ornamental Application - Early Spring	LCM	62	$53.65	$75	$259.92	4.85×
Ornamental Application - Late Spring	LCM	61	$53.83	$88.94	$259.92	4.83×
Green Plant Replacement	Heritage Landscape Services	61	$81.5	$209.95	$362.28	4.45×

An earlier version of this table was wrong

Unfiltered, it showed spreads up to 141× with a 90th-percentile rate of $10,112 per hour. That was not a pricing signal but a near-zero hours figure dividing into a whole-job price. Four exclusions now apply, all counted rather than silent: as-needed time-and-materials services, which are legitimately variable; services with under a quarter-hour of planned time; implied rates outside $5–$500 per hour; and services with fewer than 30 instances. The headline ratio is p75/p25 rather than p90/p10, because the tails of this field are dominated by data quality, not pricing decisions.

Filtered, the widest genuine spreads are three to seven times — still substantial for the same service, but a "review the lower quartile" finding rather than a dramatic one. Note also that most entries are chemical applications and plant replacement, where cost sits in product rather than labour, so price per hour is a weak unit for them in the first place.

Overtime

Recorded, material, and wildly inconsistent

Overtime as recorded on time entries.
Tenant	Time entries	With overtime	Share of entries	Overtime hours
Heartland NE	267,434	35,170	13.151%	69,825.2
JML	134,296	24,962	18.587%	50,764.4
LCM	126,401	15,721	12.437%	43,645.9
Heritage Landscape Services	203,604	15,903	7.811%	37,745.2
Heartland AZ	207,676	11,478	5.527%	22,750.8
Keesen	180,285	6,371	3.534%	12,344.9
Merit of Texas	113,927	5,306	4.657%	10,335.7
Signature	257,820	209	0.081%	471

247,883.1 hours of overtime are recorded across the group. At a half-time premium on a nominal base rate this is comfortably a seven-figure annual cost, though the precise figure needs OTLaborCost, which this pass did not retrieve.

Signature is the anomaly and it matters for every other number here. It records overtime on 0.08% of entries — 471 hours — while running the longest shifts in the group at a 10.96-hour mean, with a majority of person-days past eight hours. Either its overtime is administered outside Aspire, or it is booked as straight time. Whichever it is, Signature's TotalCostAct excludes premium pay that its peers include, so its 52.8% blended margin is flattered relative to theirs. The margin table above should be read with that in mind.

A correction worth recording. An earlier pass concluded from Signature alone that overtime fields were unusable across the estate and that overtime could not be analysed from Aspire. That was wrong. Seven of eight tenants record it, several substantially — JML at 22.4% of booked hours. Signature was simply the tenant checked first.

Interpretation

How to read these figures

Margin is an upper bound. Where overtime is real but recorded as straight time, or administered outside Aspire, TotalCostAct understates labour. Actual margin is at or below what is shown.
Drive time sits inside these costs. Crew travel is booked to customer tickets, so properties far from a yard carry their own travel in cost of service. That is correct as accounting but it means dispersed properties look less profitable for a reason within the business's control.
Coverage is 73%. Tickets without both a price and an actual cost are excluded, so these are not whole-book figures. The excluded quarter is not random — it skews toward work that was never costed.
Cross-tenant comparison is weaker than branch comparison. Overtime recording alone differs by two orders of magnitude between tenants. Rank branches within an operating company; treat the tenant table as orientation.
Nothing here is a forecast. A negative-margin ticket may have been priced deliberately, as a loss leader or a first-year concession. The list identifies where to look, not what to change.

Read the largest negative-margin jobs at Heartland NE and Heritage. The drag figures say these are concentrated in big jobs, so a few dozen tickets should account for most of the $10,673,548. They are individually identifiable today.
Pull OTLaborCost and OTLaborBurdenCost so overtime is money rather than hours, and re-cost margin with premium pay included.
Establish why Signature records no overtime — it is either a genuine cost advantage worth copying or a recording gap that makes its numbers incomparable.
Ask what an override means at Heartland NE, where 89% of services carry one. If overriding is the norm, the book is not the control anyone believes it is.
Re-test pricing dispersion on a per-visit basis rather than per hour, for the chemical and plant-replacement services where product dominates cost.

Built from Aspire production data, 1 January to 12 August 2026, 8 tenants. Margin from WorkTicket.Price and TotalCostAct; pricing from OpportunityService; overtime from WorkTicketTime.OTHours. Customer and individual names are excluded throughout.