Enter each trade business you operate. Get margin spread, weighted average, standard deviation — and the exact EBITDA uplift if your weakest businesses hit your median. No spreadsheet required.
| Business Name | Trade | Revenue (TTM) | Gross Margin % | Locations |
|---|
| Business | Trade | Revenue | Gross Margin | Est. EBITDA | EBITDA % | Quartile | EBITDA Gap |
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RollForge connects to each business's accounting data and surfaces margin drift, EBITDA attribution, and outlier alerts — automatically, every week. No quarterly spreadsheet refresh.
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When owners run business-level gross margin analysis, the average hides the story. A set of four businesses at 38% margin and two at 18% margin has an "average" of 32% — but the two outliers represent concentrated EBITDA risk and the highest-ROI margin recovery opportunity in your lineup.
In a steady set of HVAC, plumbing, or electrical businesses, gross margin variance between businesses almost always traces back to four root causes: (1) pricing discipline — the best-margin businesses have flat-rate pricing books with fewer tech-discretion discounts; (2) callback rate — every callback is a zero-revenue slot occupying a billable tech; (3) parts markup consistency — some businesses buy retail and mark up 10–15%, others have negotiated distributor pricing at 50–60% markup; (4) labor efficiency — measured as revenue per tech-day, not just billable utilization.
The owner's job is to rank-order the variance drivers, build a standardization roadmap for the bottom-quartile businesses, and track progress on a short cadence (weekly, not quarterly). The tools that automate this tracking pay for themselves in the first quarter.
Unweighted average gross margin treats a $3M business and a $30M business as equal contributors. Revenue-weighted average weights each business by its share of consolidated revenue — so a 32% business at $30M revenue moves the weighted average 10× more than a 28% business at $3M revenue. The weighted average is what gets defended in a valuation conversation. The standard deviation tells you how defensible it is.
This tool estimates EBITDA uplift by identifying businesses in the bottom quartile of gross margin (below the revenue-weighted all-business median) and calculating the incremental EBITDA if those businesses achieved the all-business median gross margin on their current revenue base. EBITDA is estimated using a standard blended SG&A/overhead multiplier of 18–22% of revenue (configurable in the calculation). This is a planning-level estimate — actual uplift depends on execution against the operational plan.
