--- title: What Does Your Business Need to Make Today? description: Turn your annual costs into a daily sales floor—and stop judging the day by how busy everyone looked. category: Money author: Shawn Duncan published: 2026-09-13 updated: 2026-09-13 canonical: https://businesscoachshawn.com/blog/what-does-your-business-need-to-make-today site: Shawn Duncan Business Advisory --- # What Does Your Business Need to Make Today? Turn your annual costs into a daily sales floor—and stop judging the day by how busy everyone looked. ## Key takeaways - Daily break-even sales equal annual fixed costs divided by your contribution margin, then divided by operating days. - Use days you can actually produce revenue—not 365 because your rent runs all year. - Break-even pays the bills. Add a profit target before setting the number your team aims for. - Track completed revenue against the target, then translate the gap into jobs, appointments, or tickets. A full parking lot is not a financial result. Neither is a crew that skipped lunch. Your business needs a dollar target for the day. Not “more than yesterday.” Not whatever number makes the morning meeting feel productive. A number that tells you whether today’s work covered today’s share of the bills. ## Break-even is the floor, not the finish line Your break-even point is the sales level where revenue covers your operating costs. No operating profit. No operating loss. You kept the machine running. Congratulations, the machine thanks you. For this calculation, split costs into two buckets: - **Fixed costs:** Costs that stay roughly the same within your current operating capacity. Rent, insurance, software, management salaries, and payroll you’re committed to paying even during a quiet week. - **Variable costs:** Costs that rise with the work you sell. Materials, job-specific subcontractors, card fees, sales commissions, and labor that genuinely scales with the workload. Don’t automatically dump all payroll into variable costs. If you pay a technician for 40 hours whether the schedule is full or empty, that payroll behaves like a fixed cost over that period. Overtime may behave differently. Include reasonable pay for the management work you do. Otherwise, you’re calculating whether the business survives with free management. Nice deal for the business. Shit deal for you. ## Find out how much of each dollar sticks The key term is contribution margin. Plain English: the share of each sales dollar left after variable costs, available to cover fixed costs and then profit. Here’s an illustrative local-service business: - Annual fixed costs: **$480,000**. - Variable costs: **40% of sales**. - Contribution margin: **60%**. Every $1,000 of sales uses $400 for variable costs. The remaining $600 helps pay that $480,000 fixed-cost bill. The calculation is: **Annual break-even sales = annual fixed costs ÷ contribution margin.** **$480,000 ÷ 0.60 = $800,000.** That business needs $800,000 in annual sales just to cover the operating costs included in the calculation. Contribution margin isn’t automatically the same as gross margin. Your accounting report may include committed field payroll in direct costs, while this calculation treats it as fixed. Classify each cost once. Don’t count the same wages in both buckets. Use your own records to establish the variable-cost percentage. The 40% here is an example, not an industry benchmark. Materials-heavy installation work and appointment-based services can produce very different numbers. ## Divide by days you can actually earn revenue Now turn the annual number into something useful before lunch. **Daily break-even sales = annual break-even sales ÷ operating days.** Suppose this business expects 250 revenue-producing days after accounting for its actual calendar: **$800,000 ÷ 250 = $3,200 per day.** That’s the daily sales floor. Don’t divide by 365 unless you actually produce revenue 365 days a year. Rent runs through Sunday. That doesn’t mean Sunday contributes sales. Count closures, holidays, maintenance shutdowns, and other days when you cannot deliver work. If you only have 230 operating days, the same business needs about **$3,478 per day** instead. Also, measure work completed or revenue earned—not quotes sent, unsigned proposals, or deposits for next month’s work. Exclude sales tax and account for discounts and refunds. Keep the definition consistent with the sales figure used in your calculation. For seasonal businesses, $3,200 is an annual daily average, not a commandment for every date. Set higher targets for peak months and realistic targets for slow months. The planned revenue still needs to add up to the annual requirement. ## Give the team a target worth hitting Break-even is a lousy ambition. It leaves no operating profit for the owner after the costs you included. Add a profit goal to the formula. Suppose this business wants **$120,000 in annual operating profit**, before interest and income taxes: **Required sales = (fixed costs + target operating profit) ÷ contribution margin.** **($480,000 + $120,000) ÷ 0.60 = $1,000,000.** **$1,000,000 ÷ 250 = $4,000 per day.** Now you have two useful numbers: - **$3,200:** The daily floor. - **$4,000:** The daily target that funds the profit goal. At a $500 average ticket, that target means eight completed jobs per day. If your team can only complete six, you have a visible problem to solve through scheduling, capacity, job mix, or pricing. “Work harder” isn’t arithmetic. Check the week, too. Five days at target means $20,000 in sales. A week producing $18,000 generates $10,800 in contribution at 60%. Subtract $9,600 in allocated weekly fixed costs, and operating profit is $1,200—half the $2,400 weekly goal. You’re above break-even. You’re still behind plan. Both can be true. This operating target also isn’t a complete cash flow plan. Loan principal payments and equipment purchases may require additional cash. Nor is operating profit necessarily your final net profit. ## Fix the missing number first Monday morning, stop asking whether the schedule looks busy. - Pull the last 12 months of financials. Separate fixed and variable costs with your bookkeeper. - Estimate the coming year’s fixed costs and contribution margin using current wages, supplier costs, and prices. - Count actual operating days. Calculate the daily floor, then add your profit goal. - Translate the target into completed jobs or appointments at your average ticket. - Put target revenue, completed revenue, and the gap on one daily scoreboard. Review the weekly total before changing course over one bad Tuesday. **Fix the missing target first.** Then you can tell whether the schedule is feeding the business—or just keeping everyone occupied. --- Source: https://businesscoachshawn.com/blog/what-does-your-business-need-to-make-today Author: Shawn Duncan, business advisor to established small businesses (Austin, Texas). Advisory: https://businesscoachshawn.com/ · Marketing: https://businesscoachshawn.com/marketing · Systems: https://businesscoachshawn.com/systems