By Aaron McLeish · 7 min read
You’ve got calls coming in. Your van is booked solid for the next three weeks. Your phone is buzzing with enquiries. By all appearances, business is thriving.
Then you pull your bank statement and stare at it for far longer than feels comfortable.
The money is there, yes. But it feels less than it should be. You are turning up, quoting, working, packing up, and doing it all again tomorrow. So why does every November feel like a scramble. Why does paying yourself feel like an afterthought.
In my eyes, you have been looking at the 80/20 rule for trades the wrong way. Or rather, you have not been looking at it at all. Let me explain.
The 80/20 rule is not a bit of business theory you paste on your office wall. It is the single fastest way to separate the activities that make money from the ones that just look busy.
The promise
By the end of this article, you will understand which 20% of your work actually drives 80% of your profit, and how to stop wasting time on everything else. That shift takes a couple of hours of honest thinking. The payoff compounds forever.
How does the 80/20 rule for trades actually work in practice?
The rule comes from an Italian economist called Vilfredo Pareto. In the late 1800s he observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. Then he noticed the same pattern everywhere. 80% of peas in his garden came from 20% of the plants. The principle held.
It sounds like a novelty until you apply it to your own business.
Consider this. In your van right now you probably carry twenty items. But which five or six of them show up on every job. Those are your 80/20 items. The rest are there just in case. You could order them on the spot and cost yourself half an hour, or you could carry them in the van and waste space the other 95% of the time.
That is the 80/20 rule working at the granular level.
Now scale it up. Look at where your phone calls come from. Where do most of your customers actually come from. Is it Google search. Is it word of mouth from one particular street or estate. Is it a repeat customer base you have built over the years. Most trades I work with, when they actually sit down and count, find that somewhere between 65% and 80% of their turnover comes from less than a quarter of their methods of getting work. Often it comes from half a dozen reliable channels, or even a handful of relationships.
That is the 80/20 rule at the business level.
Here is the uncomfortable bit. Right now you are probably pouring effort into activities that sit in the other 80%. You are doing them because you started them years ago, or because you feel you should, or because a competitor mentioned it at the van park.
You are watering the 80% and ignoring the 20%.
What about time
Let’s think about this differently. You have roughly 250 working days a year. You have maybe four weeks of holiday built in if you are lucky, and sickness happens, and the weather shuts down the work sometimes. So genuinely, maybe 200 days where you can turn up and earn.
If the 80/20 rule holds in your calendar (and it does), that means 40 of those days are worth the other 160 combined.
Forty days. Forty out of two hundred.
You cannot afford to waste those days on things that do not matter.
Where should I apply the 80/20 rule for trades in your business right now?
Let’s start with your customer list. Open up your accounting software or your phone or your notebook, whatever you use to track who paid you. Look at last year. Order every customer by the size of the invoice or the total they spent with you.
I bet the top ten customers account for more than half your turnover. I bet the top fifteen account for nearly 70%. I have seen this a hundred times. One electrician I work with found that six customers represented 65% of his income. Six out of somewhere north of eighty clients he had worked for.
This tells you something. These customers are not your volume problem. These customers are your lifeblood. Are you treating them like it. Are you returning their calls instantly. Are you prioritising their work. Are you checking in with them outside of an emergency. Or are you treating them the same as the customer who calls once a year with a tiny job.
The 80/20 rule says drop everything for your top 20%. That is not customer service. That is survival.
Now look at your work types. Does a plumber spend 80% of his time on boiler servicing, breakdowns, and routine maintenance, even though he started out hoping to do full bathroom refits. Does an electrician find that 80% of their profitable work comes from commercial clients, even though half their quotes are for domestic work. Does a builder find that extensions turn over more money than kitchen work, even though they spend equal marketing effort on both.
When you line it up like this, the question becomes obvious. Why are you not systematically focusing on the 20% that makes the money.
Let me explain the real world example here
A heating engineer I worked with kept detailed CRM records. He was organised. He tracked everything. When he finally pulled the data, he discovered something peculiar.
His contract work with three property management companies accounted for 68% of his annual turnover. His reactive callout work and one-off jobs made up the rest.
But here is where his effort lived. He spent roughly equal amounts of time and mental energy on both. He quoted every single job. He answered every weekend emergency. He stressed about Christmas shutdown because the callout work dried up.
His top three customers were automated. They knew what they wanted. The work was scheduled in advance. The invoicing was predictable. He barely thought about them.
He was spending half his mental bandwidth managing the part of his business that mattered least, and treating his most reliable income like autopilot.
When he realised this, he restructured. He raised his rates on the ad-hoc work. He created a service retainer for the contract customers. He hired a part-timer to handle weekend callouts so he was not burnt out. He stopped quoting work that was too small.
Within six months, his turnover was identical. His stress was cut in half.
That is the 80/20 rule applied to reality.
The three moves
Here are the practical next steps.
Identify: Pull your numbers and find your true 20%. Not what you think it is. The actual data.
Amplify: Once you know what the 20% looks like, make it easier. Create systems around it. Streamline it. Schedule it properly. Invest in it.
Reduce: The other 80% does not go away. But it gets the minimum viable effort. You automate it, delegate it, price it properly so it does not drain your time, or you drop it completely.
Most trades I work with have never done this exercise. They assume their business is more complex than it really is.
It is not complex. It is just unsorted.
The takeaway
You are not busy because your business is complicated. You are busy because you have not separated signal from noise. You are tending to everything with equal attention when 80% of it barely matters.
The 80/20 rule for trades is not a theory to impress people at the pub. It is permission to stop doing things.
Spend two hours this week pulling your numbers. Find your 20%. Then next week, stop doing everything else. Not today. Not in a year. Next week.
Your profit will tell you whether you made the right call.
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To go deeper on this, and to learn how to fit the 80/20 rule into a complete business strategy alongside SWOT analysis, vision, and team structure, get hold of our book “The Systems Handbook”. It walks you through the exact framework Luke used to transform Superb Plumbing and Heating from hand-to-mouth to thriving. You can find it here: https://amzn.to/45aMvUH
Connect with us to discuss how this applies to your business specifically. Email the team at info@togetherwecount.co.uk, or connect with me directly on LinkedIn at https://linkedin.com/in/aaron-mcleish. We also release original insights on all of this every week, so follow along if systems and profit interest you.
Aaron McLeish, Managing Director
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