We're 30 days into owning Country Landscaping in Bunbury.
And the revenue isn't where it should be.
Not catastrophically wrong. But wrong enough that I'm lying awake at 2am doing mental arithmetic, wondering if I've just made an expensive mistake.
Welcome to the messy reality of buying a business.
The Sinking Feeling
Every week, our accounting software spits out a P&L statement. And four weeks in, I'm staring at the revenue line thinking: "That can't be right."
So I did what any anxious new owner does—I pulled out a napkin (well, a spreadsheet) and did the back-of-envelope calculation:
X number of staff × Y hours on site × charge-out rate = expected weekly revenue
Just for the service side of the business, that equation should deliver at least 50% of our total revenue.
It wasn't.
Not even close.
And here's the thing about running a business: when you don't understand why something is happening, you can't fix it. You're just guessing. And guessing with other people's money (including my investors') is not a strategy.
The Hypothesis
Is this just handover chaos? Did the previous owner's presence keep things running smoother than I realized?
Are we pricing jobs wrong?
Are the teams efficient on site, or are we bleeding hours?
Are some customers just fundamentally unprofitable, and we're too polite to say no?
Right now, we don't know. And that's what keeps me up at night.
The current working theory: some of our smaller jobs aren't profitable. We quote them, we win them, the team does the work, and at the end of the day we've actually lost money on the job.
But that's just a hypothesis. And you can't run a business on hypotheses.
Getting Into the Weeds
So we're doing something that feels painfully manual and old-school: we're tracking the profitability of every single job.
One day at a time. One job at a time.
Staff hours. Materials. Drive time. Equipment. Overheads.
Then comparing that to what we actually invoiced.
It's tedious. It's time-consuming. And it's absolutely necessary.
Because here's what I'm learning: you cannot automate what you don't understand.
Everyone wants to jump straight to "let's build an AI system to track job profitability!"
But if you don't know what good looks like—if you can't manually track a job and understand where the profit leaked out—then your automated system will just be garbage in, garbage out.
You'll be making decisions faster, but they'll be the wrong decisions.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Data
The first 30 days of ownership have taught me something I intellectually knew but hadn't felt:
You can't manage what you don't measure.
And measuring is hard, manual work before it becomes automated work.
Right now, I'm in the uncomfortable gap between:
Not knowing why revenue is underperforming
And having the systems in place to know definitively
This gap is stressful. It's expensive. And it's unavoidable.
But it's also where the transformation happens.
Because once we finish this manual deep-dive—once we understand exactly which jobs make money and which don't—then we can:
Fix our quoting process (so we stop winning unprofitable work)
Fix our operations (so jobs don't blow out on time)
Build the automated systems that track this in real-time going forward
But we have to do the manual work first.
What This Means for the Investment Thesis
This is the messy middle of the Hyde Partners model.
We didn't buy a business that was perfectly optimized and just needed a fresh coat of paint.
We bought a business with strong fundamentals—real customers, skilled teams, essential services—but with operational blind spots.
The previous owner ran this business well enough to be profitable. But "well enough" and "optimized" are two different things.
And that gap—between "well enough" and "optimized"—is where the opportunity lives.
AI and automation will absolutely transform this business. But not yet.
First, we need to understand it. Manually. Painstakingly. Job by job.
Then we automate.
What's Next
Over the next few weeks, we'll finish the per-job profitability analysis.
We'll figure out which customer types are profitable and which aren't.
We'll redesign the quoting process.
And then—then—we'll build the systems that make sure we never have another month where we're staring at a P&L wondering what went wrong.
This is the real work of business transformation. Not sexy. Not simple.
But necessary.
And I'll keep sharing it as it happens—the wins, the failures, and the 2am spreadsheet sessions.
Because if you're thinking about buying a business, or transforming one, you need to know what it actually looks like.
It looks like this.
Nigel Gordon
Hyde Partners
P.S. If you're a business owner in WA who actually knows your per-job profitability in real-time, I want to talk to you. Either you've built something impressive, or you're lying to yourself. Let's find out which.