My cleanout vendor told me he makes more per hour on my jobs than I do and I cannot figure out if he is wrong

The comparison is accurate and the discomfort is rational. Where it breaks down is in the denominator you are using.

Your vendor's $95 per man-hour is a gross revenue rate. Pull out fuel, dump fees, truck depreciation, insurance, and labor burden on his second guy, and his actual margin per hour is probably closer to $30 to $45 depending on how he is set up. That is a real number, a good number for a service business, but it is not the whole picture you are comparing it against.

The assumption doing the most work in your analysis is that your six-month cycle and $4,200 projected margin are the right frame for the comparison. The $4,200 is not your return on hours. It is your return on capital deployed, with the hours as a cost of managing that capital. Your vendor has no claim on the upside if Crawford County moves. You do. Whether that upside materializes at the scale you need, over the timeline you are working, is the real question, and fourteen months in is early to know.

The risk you did not name: your vendor's model scales by adding trucks and bodies. Yours scales by adding capital and deals, which means your per-hour rate stays low or gets worse until your systems are tight enough that you are supervising deals rather than running them. That transition point, not the invoice comparison, is what you should be timing.

If your projected margin on that deal is sitting at $4,200 after draw costs, I would want to know how the original underwriting compared to that number and where the gap came from, because that tells you whether the hour problem is structural or deal-specific.

What did you underwrite that deal at before acquisition?

$4,200 gross over six months on one Crawford County deal is thin, not fourteen-month-thin.

The vendor comparison is correct on a per-hour basis, and that is exactly why it stings less than it should.

Take a deal bought at 80k with a 15k rehab draw. If the projected resale is 120k, the gross spread is 25k, but that number has nothing in common with the vendor's $1,900 until you account for what you are actually building: basis in a replicable system where the same acquisition skill, the same contractor relationships, and the same lender terms compound across deals, not across hours. The vendor's $95 per man-hour is a ceiling that moves only if he buys a third truck. Your $4,200 on a Crawford deal is a floor that moves every time you tighten the buy.

The number doing the most work in your math is the six-month holding period, not the gross margin. At a 7 percent hard money rate on an 80k note, six months costs roughly $2,800 in interest alone. Compress that to four months and you recover nearly a thousand dollars without touching the purchase price or the ARV. That is where the real gap between you and the vendor closes, not by billing more hours but by shortening the cycle the same way he does, which is to say, getting paid faster.

The question I would put back to you: what is the actual bottleneck adding those last two months to your hold, the rehab draw schedule or the disposition side?

The $4,200 projected is doing a lot of work in that sentence. What does it drop to if the ARV comes in 8% low or the hold stretches to nine months? Because that is the number that actually answers whether he is ahead of you, not the number you ran Tuesday night when everything still goes right.

The number you should stare at is not the $4,200 but what that deal does to your cost basis for the refinance.

If the Crawford County ARV comes in light at appraisal, the gap between what you pulled out and what the property will carry at 75 percent LTV is capital that stays trapped, sometimes for years, and that clock runs on your hourly rate too.

What is your projected ARV versus the current draw balance?