A 4-Tiered Process to Improve Garage Door Profit Margins

What Is a Good Net Profit Margin for a Garage Door Business?

Anywhere between 10% and 20% would be considered a healthy, reasonable net profit margin for a garage door business. But this is by no means the average profit margin. 

Trade businesses often operate at under 10%, and in many cases, net profit margins are as low as 2% to 3%. This is a vulnerable place to be, considering all of the costs and risks associated with running a garage door company. Not to mention, contractors operating at this level are not being compensated commensurate with their effort and risk.

This is why, from our perspective, garage door contractors should strive for a 20% profit margin after subtracting their direct costs (labor costs, equipment and materials costs, other job costs) and operating expenses (business insurance, taxes, office supplies, and other overhead expenses) from their revenue.

Additional Considerations & Exceptions

Showing a solid net profit margin is particularly important for businesses looking to sell their company in the next couple of years to get the highest multiple. 

One exception to the 10% to 20% target is for garage door businesses that are in a start-up phase, focused on acquiring new customers. In these cases, they may intentionally choose to invest in marketing, customer acquisition, and other startup costs instead of being profitable. In addition, in some circumstances, business owners might aim for a lower net profit margin for tax purposes. 

Ultimately, there’s a certain amount of variability in the net profit you choose to target based on the current goals and preferences of the business owner.

What Gross Profit Margin Should a Garage Door Company Target Across Its Services?

Based on her conversations with successful garage door business owners, trade industry veteran Ellen Rohr says that shooting for an average gross profit margin of 55% to 65% across their services is a good target for garage door companies. Doing so will generally allow them to hit a desirable 17% to 25% net profit margin.

Gross profit margin is calculated by subtracting the cost of goods sold (COGS)—typically labor, materials, and subcontractors—from sales. These are variable expenses that rise with revenue, unlike fixed overhead costs like rent or admin salaries. It’s worth noting that not every company categorizes COGS the same way—some may include things like vehicle costs or benefits—so comparing margins across businesses isn’t always apples to apples.

Still, gross profit margin is one of the best ways to measure the performance of individual departments (garage door installation, service and repair, maintenance, new construction, etc.), while net profit margin gives you the big-picture view of your entire business.

A 4-Tiered Process for Improving Garage Door Profit Margins

Tier 1: Assess Your Annual Revenue and Profit Margins and Set Goals to Improve Them

The most successful garage door contractors that we work with at ServiceTitan, both within our organization as well as the garage door businesses we serve, have a process in place to assess the current state of their operational and financial KPIs and set goals to improve them.

Typically, this takes the form of annual planning that involves:

• Reviewing how their business performed during the previous year.

• Setting operational and financial goals for the year ahead.

Whether you’re a small business or at the enterprise level, this essential step establishes the foundation for improving your profit margins. You need to know where your numbers are and set some goals for where you want them to go.

But just as important as reviewing the numbers is making sure the data itself is solid. Before you start setting goals, pause long enough to confirm that your financials are accurate and up to date. That means sitting down with your bookkeeper or CPA and asking: Where did these numbers come from? Can we trust them? Clean, reliable data is essential for making smart decisions and setting goals you can actually achieve.

Annual planning takes different shapes and forms. However, setting financial goals often involves:

1. Looking at high-level KPIs for the previous year, broken out by each department. For example: sales, gross margin, total completed service calls, sales per job, total crews/garage door technicians, total calendar days worked, sales per crew/tech, and completed jobs per crew/tech per day. 

2. Reviewing total revenue per month for each department and setting a percentage increase goal for the upcoming year. This gives you specific revenue and gross profit targets to track throughout the year.

3. Determining lead requirements to hit your revenue and profit goals. This involves reviewing lead KPIs from the previous year—like average ticket amount, number of sales, and close rate—and reverse engineering how many leads you’ll need to hit your goals.

Key Consideration: Where Do You Get This Data?

Doing this sort of detailed annual review requires capturing and recording this data throughout the year. Depending on what tools you use in your business, this can be more or less demanding and time-intensive. 

If you’re relying on spreadsheets and/or disparate software solutions for different aspects of your business—for example, separate platforms for call booking, estimating, invoicing, inventory, and accounting—analyzing your data may involve a tedious process of pulling information from multiple places, reconciling discrepancies, and double-checking inputs.

In contrast, garage door service businesses using field service software like ServiceTitan can dramatically simplify this process. For instance, if you want to view high-level KPIs such as total revenue or total sales for the past year, you can simply adjust the date range on your ServiceTitan dashboard to the previous 365 days and instantly see your results:

This is one of many reasons why leading garage door contractors are adopting ServiceTitan, which centralizes all of your operational data into one place and offers robust dashboard and reporting tools to streamline annual reviews and ongoing tracking of KPIs (discussed below).

Tier 2: Choose Specific Initiatives to Focus On

Once you’ve assessed your performance and set your profit goals (Tier 1), the next step is deciding what specific actions you and your team are going to take to move those numbers. This is where the work gets strategic—and, in the words of Ellen Rohr, “super sexy.”

The idea is to look at where you are today, compare it to where you want to be (your budget or forecast), and ask: What can we do to close that gap?

These initiatives typically fall into two categories:

• Efforts to increase sales (offense)

• Efforts to lower expenses or control costs (defense)

Here are some examples of high-impact initiatives to consider, along with specific tools and strategies to help you execute them:

Driving More Sales

• Raise your prices. This is one of the most powerful and immediate levers for improving profit margins. Even modest increases can give your business more breathing room. Once you make the decision to raise prices, be sure to update your pricebook, estimate templates, and tech training materials accordingly. Improve your sales process. Whether you're selling service calls, new door installs, or maintenance plans, a strong sales process can boost your close rate and average ticket size. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel—adopt a proven, industry-specific framework, tweak it to fit your team, and then train and practice until it becomes second nature.

• Leverage tools like ServiceTitan’s SalesPro. If you’re a ServiceTitan customer, SalesPro can help implement a repeatable, high-performing sales process for your techs right inside the app. This is especially useful in the garage door industry, where consistent quoting and presentation can have a big impact on conversions.

• Run contests or offer incentives. Sales contests and spiffs can be an effective short-term boost. Whether it’s rewarding the highest average ticket or the most maintenance agreements sold, the key is to tie rewards to the KPIs you want to move.

Controlling Costs

• More effective job costing. If you’re consistently undercharging or underestimating labor hours, profit margins will suffer. ServiceTitan provides detailed job costing data to help you identify problem areas and adjust your estimating process accordingly.

• Monitor and manage overtime. Overtime can quickly eat into profits if left unchecked. Regularly reviewing time tracking reports can help flag patterns early and potentially open up conversations about scheduling or staffing needs.

• Revisit your compensation plan. Pay structure can have a big impact on both morale and profitability. Consider whether your comp plan incentivizes the right behavior—and be careful when making changes. This area requires thoughtful communication and planning.

• Leverage dispatching software to improve efficiency. Optimizing routes and dispatch decisions with ServiceTitan Dispatch Pro can help reduce windshield time, increase completed jobs per day, and minimize unnecessary overtime. For businesses running multiple crews, this can be especially impactful.

The goal of this step isn’t to do everything at once. It’s to choose a handful of strategic initiatives that will actually move the metrics—and align your team around executing them (more on that in Tier 3). SalesPro, DispatchPro, and ServiceTitan’s job costing and reporting features give you the insights and capabilities to act with confidence.

Once you've picked the right initiatives, you're ready to start executing. That's where Tier 3—project management and team empowerment—comes into play.

Tier 3: Project Management—Having a System to Execute Your Initiatives

Once you’ve established your goals (Tier 1) and chosen specific initiatives to act on (Tier 2), the next step is execution. This is where the rubber meets the road—and where many garage door businesses get tripped up.

You can have productive team meetings filled with great ideas:

“We should run a sales contest.” “Let’s train our techs on selling service agreements.” “It might be time to raise prices.”

But if those ideas leave the meeting without a clear plan or accountability structure, they’re unlikely to happen. That’s why project management is the key to turning insights into action.

To ensure follow-through, it’s critical to implement a formal system for managing and executing projects. Many top-performing contractors use a framework like EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System), which is outlined in the book Traction by Gino Wickman. It’s a practical, structured approach that helps teams align goals with weekly priorities, assign accountability, and consistently follow through. 

Another excellent resource is Al Levi’s The 7-Power Contractor, which provides a simpler—but highly effective—process for project planning, list-making, and weekly check-ins. Whether you choose EOS, Al Levi’s framework, or another system, the key is to establish a consistent cadence for turning good ideas into real outcomes.

The bottom line: Don’t let great ideas die in meetings. With the right project management system and team buy-in, you can turn best practices into everyday habits—and hit the profit goals you set back in Tier 1.

Tier 4: Ongoing Tracking of KPIs and Pacing Toward Your Profit Targets

To effectively pace toward your revenue and profit goals, ongoing KPI tracking is just as important as annual planning and project management. This means developing daily, weekly, and monthly routines to monitor both primary KPIs—like net profit, gross profit, and other high-level financial metrics from your accounting system—and secondary KPIs, such as revenue coming in, calls booked, close rates, average ticket price, and job volume. These secondary indicators give you early insights into whether you're trending in the right direction before the financials fully reflect it.

For example, if you’re the business owner, you can benefit from: 

• A simple daily report that shows how many calls came in, how much revenue was booked, and how you're pacing toward your monthly goals. 

• A weekly financial quick check (FQC)—a term coined by trade industry expert Ellen Rohr. See a demo of her process here. 

• An end-of-month financial review with your bookkeeper or accountant (and subsequently your leadership team) to assess overall performance and make strategic adjustments as needed.

Meanwhile, if you’re a CSR manager, your daily focus might be on more granular metrics like:

• Call booking rates

• Number of outbound and inbound calls

• Conversion rates.

Again, the ease of collecting and accessing this data depends on the tools you use. Facilitating the ongoing tracking of secondary KPIs is an area where field service reporting software can be transformative for garage door businesses.

With ServiceTitan, owners and managers can customize their own dashboards and reports to monitor all of this data in real-time—making it significantly easier to stay on track and hit your year-end goals.

For example, Revenue Trends by month or week provide year-over-year revenue comparisons. 

The Company Metrics portion of the dashboard shows sales, revenue, booking, conversion numbers, and more:

• Total sales

• Closed average ticket price

• Completed revenue

• Average revenue per job opportunity

• Revenue from counter sales, and membership and progress billing

• Revenue from adjustment invoices added to jobs

Metrics on the main dashboard also include call-booking rate and total conversion rate, plus:

• Customer satisfaction

• Total cancellations 

• Membership opportunities converted

In addition to these high-level KPIs, the ServiceTitan dashboard provides garage door business owners and administrators with valuable insights on employee and operational performance.

For example, the Call Metrics section of the dashboard features a chart, arranged as a function of call date, documenting inbound call booking rates. Below the chart, users will find call lead totals and the jobs booked from those leads.

Information about calls that were abandoned or did not result in a booking is no less valuable. The Call Metrics section also offers a wealth of intelligence on these calls:

• Length

• Timestamp

• Caller phone number

• Number dialed

• Employee who took the call

For further information about past calls — whether they resulted in a booking or not — ServiceTitan offers a Call Playback feature. Here, users can listen to recordings of calls. 

This feature is useful for field service technicians who want to verify job details or customer information via the ServiceTitan mobile app, as well as for supervisors, who can use it to confirm that CSRs are providing good customer support and following best practices in interactions with clients.  

In contrast to tracking these metrics in spreadsheets and different apps, ServiceTitan makes it simple to access this data, and therefore empowers business owners, managers, and employees to actually use these tools and follow these best practices of ongoing KPI tracking, which can be absolutely invaluable for maintaining cash flow and improving profit margins. 

Get a ServiceTitan Demo to See How We Can Help You Optimize and Grow Your Garage Door Business 

Using best-in-class garage door software like ServiceTitan gives contractors the tools they need to maintain full visibility into their business, leverage automation, and empower their teams with the tools they need to grow. 

In addition to the dashboard and reporting features discussed above, our software offers tools to facilitate the entire garage door business workflow, including:

• Call booking

• Scheduling

• Dispatching

• Work orders

• Pricebook

• Invoices

• Payments & credit card processing

Additional Resources to Increase Garage Door Leads

Marketing, advertising, and lead generation can feel intimidating to many garage door businesses. Here are some articles to help improve these efforts and drive more business:

• How to Start a Garage Door Business: 9 Actionable Steps — Review fundamentals including business plans and accounting best practices. 

• Successful Garage Door Marketing: Guide w/ 11 Actionable Ideas — Review the top analog and digital marketing strategies used by successful commercial and residential garage door businesses.

• 16 Tested Ways to Get Garage Door Leads — Learn the top industry trends for driving garage door leads.

• Garage Door SEO: The Ultimate Guide — Learn how search engine optimization can help you show up in organic search and get discovered by homeowners and other potential customers.

• Social Media for Garage Door Businesses: Definitive Guide — Learn how to leverage social media platforms to drive more business.

• Garage Door Repair PPC: Benefits, Ad Types, Platforms & More — Learn how to use paid digital advertising to acquire new customers.

• Email Marketing for Garage Door Companies — See strategies and examples of leveraging email marketing to sell repair services, installation services, and new garage door systems.