One email a week
A plain-talk money lesson for owners: ratios, equipment math, cash flow — one useful idea in your inbox every week, in shop language.
Blue Collar Banker
One email a week. Ratios, equipment math, and cash flow — in shop language, from a business banker.
Free. One email a week. Unsubscribe anytime.
No fluff, no sales pitch. Just the numbers behind running a shop, explained the way owners actually talk.
A plain-talk money lesson for owners: ratios, equipment math, cash flow — one useful idea in your inbox every week, in shop language.
Free tools that run the numbers before the bank does — job profit, pricing, crew cost, payroll cash, equipment cost, and more — so you walk in already knowing how the math comes out.
Subscribe and get a clean one-page summary of your numbers, ready to hand to your banker or your CPA.
Sixteen free tools, built around the same math a banker runs on your numbers. Run them before your next loan conversation, equipment buy, or hire.
Calculator 01
See how your debt service coverage stacks up against the 1.25x standard most banks lend against — before you ever sit down with one.
Run itCalculator 02
A true three-way equipment cost comparison — total cost, cash out of pocket, and what each path does to your cash flow.
Run itCalculator 03
How many months of cash you have left, your run-dry date, and the cushion gap — the number that decides how you sleep at night.
Run itCalculator 04
Run a finished job's real numbers — labor, materials, equipment, overhead — and find out whether it actually paid.
Run itCalculator 05
Build the price from your true costs plus the margin you need, instead of guessing off the last guy's bid.
Run itCalculator 06
The loaded cost of an hour of crew time — wages, taxes, insurance, and benefits — not just the hourly rate on the paycheck.
Run itCalculator 07
The monthly sales number your shop has to hit just to cover every cost — before a single dollar of profit.
Run itCalculator 08
A 13-week, week-by-week cash check that flags the tight weeks before they sneak up on payday.
Run itCalculator 09
Your machine's true hourly cost — payments, fuel, maintenance, and wear — so work that uses it gets priced right.
Run itCalculator 10
What a new hire really costs, and how much extra work they have to bring in to pay for themselves.
Run itCalculator 11
Knock 5% or 10% off the price and see exactly how much more you have to sell to make the same money.
Run itCalculator 12
How long your cash holds through the slow months, and how big a cushion you need to make it to spring.
Run itCalculator 13
Price change orders with your real costs and margin baked in — no more free extras quietly eating the job.
Run itCalculator 14
Whether each truck in the fleet actually earns its keep once you count every cost it carries.
Run itCalculator 15
Growth eats cash before it pays. See how much working capital a bigger year will actually take.
Run itCalculator 16
Slow-paying customers cost real money. Put a dollar figure on every week your invoices sit unpaid.
Run itBlue Collar Banker is built by a business banker who works with owners in the trades every day — the grading crews, HVAC shops, electricians, and builders who keep things running.
Most owners never get shown the math a bank runs on their business, so decisions get made in the dark. This site fixes that. Everything here is education: no jargon, no lectures, just the math behind the decisions — explained in plain shop language.
One plain-talk money lesson every week — ratios, equipment math, and cash flow, in shop language.
One email a week. No spam, no selling your address. Unsubscribe anytime.