13 Plumbing Business KPIs That Predict Next Quarter's Revenue

Most plumbing owners stare at bank balance and job count and call it a dashboard. Revenue for next quarter is already baked into 13 leading indicators hiding inside your CRM today. Pull them weekly and you know in April whether Q3 is going to be good or ugly.

Dashboards go stale. The numbers below are the ones to know, the benchmarks to beat, and the exact way to pull them in plain English.

1. Booking Rate

Booking rate = booked calls / inbound opportunities. ServiceTitan's 2024 data shows plumbing had the highest booking rate of any trade at 43 percent for the month of June, driven by emergency demand.

Top operators push this to 70 percent. John Wilson (Wilson Companies, on track for $100M in Ohio-based plumbing, HVAC, and electrical) has said publicly on Owned and Operated that lead flow and sales should eat the majority of owner attention before anything else.

Booking rate moves first when something breaks. Watch it daily, not monthly.

Text Sully: "plumbing booking rate this week versus last week, by CSR"

2. Call Conversion Rate (Lead to Job)

Conversion rate = jobs booked / total inbound leads. Plumbing has the highest conversion rate of any trade at 12 to 16 percent per ServiceTitan, because emergency calls do not comparison shop.

That advantage disappears the moment your CSR fumbles the call. An answered call that does not book is usually a pricing-objection or availability-objection fail, not a "they called three other plumbers" fail.

See AI receptionist for plumbing: build vs buy for the options on handling after-hours calls.

Text Sully: "calls that did not book last week and the disposition reason"

3. Average Order Value (Average Ticket)

AOV = total revenue / completed jobs. Benchmark plumbing average order value sits around $445 with 71 percent contribution margin per financial modeling data for plumbing service businesses.

ServiceTitan customers typically grow average ticket 6 percent year over year once flat-rate pricing and options-based selling are installed. First-year ServiceTitan shops often see 20 to 30 percent ticket growth as they rebuild pricing.

Break this out by call type. Drain cleaning, water heater, repipe, and fixture install should each have their own AOV target.

Text Sully: "average ticket by job type last 30 days"

4. Close Rate on Major Repair and Install

Close rate = sold jobs / quoted jobs for quotes over a certain threshold (usually $1,500+). Top plumbing operators run 35 to 45 percent close rate on major work. Average shops sit at 20 to 25 percent.

The lever is not price, it is options given per call. Techs presenting three options close 38 to 44 percent. Techs presenting one close 18 to 22 percent. Same customers, same pricing book.

Peterman Brothers built their KPI system around execution metrics (close rate, membership conversion) and effort metrics (options presented, reviews requested) to scale from $50M to $90M in 12 months.

Text Sully: "close rate on quotes over $1,500, by tech, last 90 days"

5. Revenue Per Technician

Revenue per tech = trailing 12-month revenue / field headcount. Top plumbing operators clear $250,000 per tech. Mid-tier shops land $150K to $200K.

This is a forward indicator. If it drops three weeks in a row, something is broken in dispatch, pricing, or tech morale. Do not wait for the quarterly P&L.

Tommy Mello has said he tracks per-person KPIs weekly across every role, including CSRs, techs, and dispatchers, because aggregate revenue hides the individual problem until it is expensive.

Text Sully: "revenue per technician trailing 90 days, ranked"

6. Speed to Lead (First Response Time)

Speed to lead = minutes between lead arrival and first contact attempt. Hatch found contractors responding under 5 minutes are 21x more likely to qualify the lead than those waiting 30 minutes.

The painful Hatch data: 88 percent of contractors take longer than 5 minutes to reply, with 37 percent taking a full day. Plumbing is the worst offender on after-hours response because most shops rely on the owner's cell forwarding.

A sub-60-second response lifts booking rate by 15 to 30 points in most shops. See AI lead qualification agents for how.

Text Sully: "average response time on leads from yesterday, by source"

7. Missed Call Rate and Missed Call Revenue

Missed call rate = unanswered calls / total inbound. Invoca's 2025 data shows plumbing answers only 66 percent of inbound calls, behind pest control (75 percent) and auto repair (79 percent). Each missed call is worth roughly $1,200 in revenue.

A plumbing shop taking 800 calls a month misses 272. At $1,200 average miss value, that is $326K a month in leaked opportunity.

Missed-call text-back alone recovers 25 to 40 percent of those. See missed call text back for contractors.

Text Sully: "missed calls yesterday that I have not called back yet"

8. Membership (Club Plan) Attach Rate

Membership attach rate = new memberships sold / eligible service calls. Baseline is 40 to 50 percent. Best operators hit 60 to 90 percent.

Why it predicts next quarter's revenue: members generate 2.5x the revenue per year of non-members and have 2.5 to 3x the LTV. Today's memberships are next summer's service calls.

Peterman Brothers, Wilson Companies, and other fast-scaling operators treat membership as the single most important forward-looking KPI. Flat-rate $99/year per address has pushed some shops to 90 percent attach.

Text Sully: "new memberships sold this week and total active members"

9. Recall Rate and First-Time Fix Rate

Recall rate = jobs requiring a callback within 30 days / total jobs. First-time fix rate is the inverse. Industry average first-time fix is 75 percent, top operators clear 85 percent.

Every recall is a truck roll (loaded cost $150 to $200), lost tech hours, parts exposure, and a NPS-killing customer moment. A 10-point lift in first-time fix on a 4,000-job shop is 400 fewer truck rolls, roughly $70K recovered.

Recall rate is usually a truck-stock or training issue, not a tech-skill issue. Pull the data by job type and you will see the pattern.

Text Sully: "callbacks in the last 30 days, by tech and original job type"

10. Accounts Receivable Aging and DSO

DSO = average days between invoice and payment. Trades DSO averages 56 days, but top plumbing operators pull this under 30 days through same-day invoicing, card-on-file, and auto-charge on membership plans.

Invoicing within 24 hours of completion reduces DSO by 5 to 8 days on its own per Foundation Software's 2025 data. The common failure: techs close out jobs 2 to 3 days late on the iPad, which bloats DSO across the whole shop.

Cash flow kills more plumbing shops than lack of demand.

Text Sully: "invoices over 30 days past due with customer and amount"

11. Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Booked Job

CPL = marketing spend / leads. CPBJ = marketing spend / jobs booked. LocaliQ's 2025 home services data shows average CPL of $90.92, with plumbing typically running $80 to $110.

The useful number is cost per booked job, not cost per lead. A $110 CPL that books at 20 percent is $550 per job. A $140 CPL that books at 45 percent is $311 per job. Source two looks more expensive and is actually 44 percent cheaper.

See AI for Google Local Service Ads for contractors.

Text Sully: "cost per booked job by lead source last 60 days"

12. Review Velocity and NPS

Review velocity = new 4 and 5 star reviews per month. BrightLocal's 2024 survey found 27 percent of consumers say reviews from the past two weeks impact their decisions. Yesterday's reviews count, last year's barely do.

Construction and home services NPS sits at 42 in 2026 per Retently. Plumbing shops that generate 20+ new reviews a month typically outrank larger competitors on Google Maps in 90 days.

88 percent of consumers would use a business that replies to all its reviews, versus 47 percent for one that does not respond at all (BrightLocal).

Text Sully: "reviews from last 14 days with tech name and rating"

13. Customer Lifetime Value

LTV = average revenue per customer across their full relationship. Plumbing LTV varies wildly by shop. Members run $3,500 to $8,000+ over 5 years. Non-members run $400 to $1,500.

The ratio to watch: LTV:CAC should sit at 3:1 or better. Under 2:1 means marketing is subsidizing the business rather than scaling it.

LTV is the metric that justifies paying up for membership and review-generation campaigns. It takes 18 to 36 months to prove out, but the leading indicators (membership attach rate, recall rate, NPS) tell you in real time whether LTV is trending up or down.

Text Sully: "average revenue per member over the last 3 years versus average per non-member"

Which KPIs predict next quarter versus which report on last quarter

Revenue, job count, and technician hours are lagging indicators. They tell you what already happened. You cannot change them by the time you see them.

The six leading indicators in this list are booking rate, speed to lead, close rate on major repair, membership attach rate, first-time fix rate, and review velocity. Move any one of these by 10 percent this month and Q3 revenue moves 4 to 8 percent. Miss all six this month and Q3 is already lost regardless of what the marketing budget does.

The best operators in home services (Tommy Mello, John Wilson, the Peterman brothers) publicly talk about running these six leading indicators every single week per CSR, per tech, per lead source. Not per shop, per person. Aggregate hides the individual problem until it compounds into a revenue problem three months later.

The reason dashboards lose to chat

Every plumbing shop has tried building a KPI dashboard. It works for six weeks. Then a tech starts coding jobs to the wrong category, or the CSR stops filling the source field, or ServiceTitan updates a report schema and the whole thing quietly drifts 15 percent off.

Chat-based KPI retrieval skips that problem. You ask Sully "booking rate this week by CSR" and it pulls live from your CRM, company-filtered, against the current schema. No BI tool, no Looker seat, no weekly maintenance. The metric is always current because it is calculated at the moment you ask.

The 13 KPIs above already live in your ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Workiz, or Jobber instance. The question is whether you pull them weekly or wait for the quarterly review to tell you Q3 is already lost. A five-minute Monday review of booking rate, missed calls, speed to lead, and close rate replaces the $40K Looker implementation that nobody opens anymore.

See how AI agents for plumbers fit this pattern.

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