I run a pressure washing company in Palm Coast, Florida.
That's the headline. Before I built any software, before I learned what indirect cost allocation meant in the context of a single job, before we spent six months rebuilding what I thought was done — I was the guy in the driveway with a hose in my hand, trying to figure out whether the job I just finished made me any money.
This page is the longer answer to how that turned into JobMargin.
The background
Eleven years in the United States Air Force. I ran teams and solved problems under pressure. After that, an MBA in finance. Ten years managing 160 faculty members at a university. Before that, government contracting — the world where "best value" versus "lowest price technically acceptable" is a real question that determines whether you win a bid or lose it.
None of that makes me a software developer. What it did was train me to look at numbers before I look at outcomes. You don't run a team of 160 or bid on a government contract without learning that the math comes first and the story comes second.
When I got into pressure washing, the math went first. I set hourly targets from day one — $150 an hour, then $200, eventually $425 on commercial. I was tracking every job the way I'd have tracked any line item in any business I'd ever run.
I was tracking it wrong.
The trade
I didn't fall into the trade. I chose it.
Low barrier to entry. Year-round climate in Florida. Great margins when you know how to price. And a legitimate opportunity to bring drone work and technology to what is — and I'll say this plainly because it's true — a pale, stale, and male industry. The photo up there is me running a drone on a water tower at Daytona State College. That was a pro bono job. Daytona State is my daughter's alma mater — she started there before transferring to Stetson University on a full-ride scholarship. They invested in my daughter, so I invested in them.
That's the kind of trade this can be when you decide to run it like a business and treat the community like it matters. I wanted to bring the industry to the next level. Not by pretending I was above the work — I'm in the truck, in the gear, on the ladder. By running the business like it was a business, not a hobby.
The admission
I undervalued my jobs by fifteen to twenty percent in the first year. I had a scarcity mentality. I needed to win them all.
That's the admission that anchors the rest of this page. A finance MBA with scarcity mentality is still a finance MBA with scarcity mentality — the training doesn't erase the fear. I wanted every job I bid. I priced like it. And when I started tracking my real numbers — not revenue, but what I actually kept after running the business — I could see what that aggressive pricing had done. I was winning work that I should have won at more money, and I was winning work I should have walked away from because I'd priced it below water anyway.
If I'm winning 65% of my work, I'm probably priced right. If I'm winning too much, I'm probably too cheap. That's the rule I operate by now. It took me losing a few jobs to believe it.
The origin
I'd been using Markate for three years. I'd kept spreadsheets on the side. Both of them told me my revenue. Neither of them told me what I kept.
So we started building our own tool. The first version was designed around how I think — linear, step-by-step, one stage at a time. Estimate, schedule, do the work, invoice, get paid, review margin. That's my brain. That's how I operate.
Then I showed it to John.
John is a painting contractor. Seven employees. Thirty years in the trade. A close friend of mine. He's brilliant at the work. He does not think in linear steps. He thinks in batches, in rhythms, in "just let me get this invoice out the door so I can go paint."
When he used my software, he hit walls everywhere. Every step I'd locked in as a prerequisite was a step he didn't want to take. He wanted to skip to invoicing without running through my whole flow. He wanted monthly billing pulled out as its own thing, not tied into the visit-by-visit mechanic I'd designed. I'd built a tool for me. He needed a tool that worked for someone who wasn't me.
That's the moment it became a product.
We pulled the monthly billing out. We made invoice generation runnable without walking through every prior step. We built in off-ramps for the contractor who doesn't want to follow the happy path. JobMargin today handles both brains — the linear operator who wants every step structured, and the non-linear operator who wants the software to get out of the way.
The features
The compensation engine came from a paver sealing contractor who asked me whether JobMargin could handle the nine percent he paid his crew on paver work versus the nineteen percent on pressure washing. I hadn't thought about it. We built it.
The customer portal came from a competitor I was pitching against on a commercial account. They had one. I didn't. We built ours.
The dispatch board came from me trying to manage my own crew across back-to-back jobs with sticky notes and text messages. We built what I needed.
The margin card — the thing on the estimate screen that shows revenue, gross margin, and true margin after indirect cost allocation, live, before you click send — came from every single estimate I'd sent where I didn't really know the answer to "am I going to make money on this?"
Every feature in JobMargin maps to a real person asking a real question, or a real problem I had that nobody's software solved for me. That's the product philosophy. It's why contractors recognize the tool when they see it.
The purpose
At the end of the day, we're solving a toleration for the customer and a toleration for the contractor.
For the customer, we provide a service that lets them feel better about where they live — a clean driveway, a house that looks the way it's supposed to look, a roof without biological growth, a patio they're proud to walk onto. Pride in where they live. That's a real thing. That's what the trade does.
For the contractor, we solve the toleration of running a legitimate business on guesswork. You shouldn't have to wait until year-end with a bookkeeper and a stack of CSV files to find out whether you made money. You should know on every estimate, every job, every week. Before you click send.
That's what JobMargin is. It's the tool I wish I'd had my first year in the trade.
Fourteen days free. No credit card.
Or if you want to model what different compensation structures actually cost your business before you decide anything, the comp calculator is public at jobmargin.io/comp-calculator. No signup required. Either way — welcome. Thanks for reading this far.