If yours is not here, ask. We answer it and then it is here.
Written by JD Davenport, who still sells for a living.
Some questions do not fit in a paragraph. Those get a page of their own:
This page is for deciding. If you have paid and a download failed, a file will not open, a formula looks wrong, or you want a refund, that is all on the support page, with the address that reaches a person.
Files. Written standards you put your own name on, spreadsheets that do the arithmetic, a tool that runs in your browser, a short guide to hand to whoever fills the thing in, and two prompts for running it with an AI. They download to your computer and they stay there.
No, and the difference matters. A template is a blank you fill in. These are working systems: the spreadsheets calculate, the tests run, the tool does a day of work in a minute, and every document names exactly which sections to delete if you do not run that part of a business. A template pack leaves you to work out what applies. This tells you.
No. There is nothing to log into, nothing that expires and nothing that phones home. The spreadsheets open in Excel or Google Sheets. The browser tool is one HTML file you double-click. It all works on a laptop in a truck with no signal.
One person, in a live contracting company, against real numbers. Everything in a kit was built to solve a problem that was costing that business money, then stripped of every name, price and identifying detail before it went in a box. More about that.
If you quote the work, do the work and send an invoice, yes. Detailing, power washing, lawn care, fencing, decking, excavating, painting, roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, solar, remodeling, restoration, flooring, paving, pools, pest control, tree work, custom fabrication. Nothing in a kit knows what trade you are in. You set the vocabulary, and the arithmetic does not care.
Then several files come in two editions, numbered the same, marked on your own or not. You open the one that is you and delete the other. Nothing is trimmed down for a smaller business and nothing assumes people you do not have.
The other edition of the same files. Both ship in the same box, at the same price, and the standards inside them are word for word identical, so a business that starts on its own and later hires does not have to unlearn anything.
Yes, because it does not connect to it. Nothing here logs into AccuLynx, JobNimbus, ServiceTitan, QuickBooks or anything else, and nothing needs an export in a particular shape. You read a number off whatever you already use and type it into a spreadsheet, or you paste a block of rows into a browser tool. That is on purpose. A kit that integrated with one CRM would break the week that CRM changed something, and would be useless to everybody on a different one.
If you can open a spreadsheet and type in it, you can run all of this. There is nothing to install, no account, no setup wizard and no code. The browser tools are one file you double-click. The hardest thing in any kit is deciding what your own numbers should be, and the documents walk you through that in order.
Part of it, yes, and the part that does the work. The browser tool out of each kit is on the free tools page, whole, no account and no email. That is the piece you would use every week. The documents and the spreadsheets are what you pay for. Both books have free samples on the books page as well, and the book is the method the kits are built on.
If your price is on a list before you arrive, there is nothing to diagnose and no recommendation to build, so The Appointment Standard is not for you. If your cost of goods is known at the moment of sale, or you sell hours against a rate card, The Job Cost Standard will not tell you much you do not already know. Retail does not fit. Anything sold entirely over the phone does not fit. Each kit says this on its own first page rather than on page ninety.
No. Each kit stands alone and nothing in one needs another to work. Start with the problem that is costing you now. If you want all four as one system there is The Complete Standard.
The first hour. The browser tool that comes with each kit needs nothing set up: you paste in what you already have and it hands back the answer. The spreadsheet works the first time you type a job into it. Nothing has to be rolled out to anybody before either of those is useful to you.
What takes longer is the part that involves other people changing how they work, and that is different for each kit. The start here document in every box gives the order and says what breaks if you skip a step.
| Kit | To decide it | To have it running | Then, every cycle |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Job Cost Standard | One afternoon | One day, the first audit | An hour a month |
| The Production Standard | One afternoon | Two weeks | Twenty minutes a week |
| The Commission Standard | One afternoon | Two weeks | Twenty minutes a pay cycle |
| The Appointment Standard | One afternoon | Six weeks, because it is six weeks of drills | Twenty minutes a week |
The first step in every kit is reading one document that argues why the thing fails. Twelve to twenty minutes. If you disagree with it, stop there and take the refund, because nothing after it will stick.
Every file in every kit, what it is, and what it does for you once it is in use. This is the whole contents. Nothing is held back for a bigger package and there is no upsell inside a kit.
Each kit is $149. The kits page has the same lists with the buy buttons next to them.
| File | What it is | What it does for you |
|---|---|---|
| 00 START HERE | What to open first, in what order, and what breaks if you skip a step. | You install it in the right order instead of opening four files at once and finishing none of them. |
| 01 Why You Cannot Tell Which Jobs Made Money | The reasoning. The document you hand a partner who thinks the books are fine. | You can hand somebody the argument instead of having it. If they disagree with this, nothing after it would have stuck anyway. |
| 02 The Reconciliation Standard Word, editable | The twelve tests every dollar you paid out has to pass. | A payment nobody checked stops being possible rather than merely unlikely. |
| 03 The Exception Register Spreadsheet | One row per payment that did not reconcile, what failed, and what it would take to close it. | The things that did not reconcile stop living in somebody's head. One row, one owner, one date, and a number you can total. |
| 04 The One-Day Audit Run Sheet Word, editable | Eight phases in order, with what comes out of each. Hand it to whoever runs the day. | You get a whole year reconciled in a day by somebody who is not you, because the day is written down phase by phase. |
| 05 The Job Cost Workbook - one person Spreadsheet | The centerpiece, for a business where nobody is paid a share of the job. | You find out which jobs made money this week rather than at tax time, on one number that covers everything at once. |
| 05 The Job Cost Workbook - with a sales team Spreadsheet | The same workbook with the pay machinery in it: rate, earned, withheld. | The same, plus the pay machinery, so the figure a salesperson is paid on is the figure the job actually made. |
| 06 The Flag Vocabulary Word, editable | Every flag the workbook can raise, what it means, and what closes it. | Two people looking at the same flag reach the same conclusion. An argument about what a word means is an argument nobody wins. |
| 07 The Crew Rate Card Spreadsheet | What you agreed to pay each payee per unit, and when that price came into force. | What you agreed to pay stops being a memory. A rate that drifted upward shows up as a line rather than as a worse year. |
| 08 The Estimating Gap List Spreadsheet | Every time the built job was not the priced job, and whether the fix held. | The same thing stops being missed off estimates, because a gap that was fixed and came back is visible as exactly that. |
| 09 Running The Day - a guide for whoever does it | Four minutes, for whoever runs the audit. Hand it out. | The audit stops being a thing only you can run. |
| 10 Surfaced (the app) Browser tool | Paste a payment ledger, it runs the twelve tests in your browser and hands back the register. | A year of payments gets the twelve tests in about a minute, in your browser, without anything being uploaded anywhere. |
| 11 The Audit - how to audit any part of your business | The book. The method behind the kit, at full length. | You can point the method at anything else in the business once job cost is running. |
| 12 Shared Definitions | The same vocabulary in every kit, so any two of them work together. | Buy a second kit later and it drops in beside the first. No reconciling two sets of words. |
| LICENSE AND DISCLAIMER Text | One business, yours forever. Nothing expires. | Nothing renews, and no decision of ours can ever switch it off. |
| RUN IT WITH AI - copy this prompt Text | Runs the recurring pass with you, reading the queue the spreadsheet produced. | The monthly pass happens even in a month when you do not feel like doing it, because somebody else is asking the questions. |
| SET UP WITH AI - copy this prompt Text | Interviews you and fills the kit in around your business. | You answer questions for twenty minutes instead of reading a manual, and get back a setup sheet for your own business. |
| File | What it is | What it does for you |
|---|---|---|
| 00 START HERE | What to open first, in what order, and what breaks if you skip a step. | You install it in the right order instead of opening four files at once and finishing none of them. |
| 01 Why Jobs Lose Money After They Are Sold | The reasoning. Read it before you change anything. | You stop blaming the price for a cost that was created after the price was agreed. |
| 02 The Pre-Install Gate Word, editable | One review before material is ordered. The last cheap moment on the job. | The last cheap moment on the job gets used. A mistake caught here costs a phone call; caught on the roof it costs a day. |
| 03 The Close-Out Gate Word, editable | One record on the day the job finishes, filled in on site. | What actually happened gets recorded on the day, on site, by the person who was there, rather than reconstructed on Friday. |
| 04 The Checklist Builder Spreadsheet | Builds the parts list for the pre-install gate out of twenty of your own jobs. | It asks about what actually goes wrong on your jobs, not on somebody else's. |
| 05 The Pre-Install Tracker Spreadsheet | One row per review. Returns your extra-material rate. | You get a number for how often you buy material twice, which is a number almost nobody in this trade has. |
| 06 The Close-Out Tracker Spreadsheet | One row per finished job. Returns your first-time-complete rate and your return-trip rate. | A return trip stops being invisible. It costs a day and leaves no trace anywhere today. |
| 07 The Handoff Scorecard Word, editable | Four scores at the moment a sold job reaches production. | You find out a job arrived incomplete on the day, not when somebody is standing on the roof without it. |
| 07 The Handoff To Yourself Word, editable | The same four scores where the person who sells the job also builds it. | The hardest case to catch, because the person who left the gap is the person who has to notice it. |
| 08 Build These As Forms | If you want the two gates on a phone instead of on paper. The full question list for each. | It ends up on the phone already in their hand, instead of on paper filled in from memory on Friday. |
| 09 The Two Pages - a guide for whoever fills them in | Four minutes, for whoever fills the gates in. Hand it out. | They get it right on the job that is not textbook, because they know why the field is there. |
| 10 The Production Board Spreadsheet | Every job, who is doing it and which day, in two views built from one sheet. | Nobody has to ask where anybody is, and nobody has to remember. |
| 11 Charted (the app) Browser tool | Paste your stops, say how many one person covers in a day, and the week comes back in driving order. | Routing stops being decided by whoever is loudest at seven in the morning. |
| 12 Shared Definitions | The same vocabulary in every kit, so any two of them work together. | Buy a second kit later and it drops in beside the first. No reconciling two sets of words. |
| LICENSE AND DISCLAIMER Text | One business, yours forever. Nothing expires. | Nothing renews, and no decision of ours can ever switch it off. |
| RUN IT WITH AI - copy this prompt Text | Runs the recurring pass with you, reading the queue the spreadsheet produced. | The monthly pass happens even in a month when you do not feel like doing it, because somebody else is asking the questions. |
| SET UP WITH AI - copy this prompt Text | Interviews you and fills the kit in around your business. | You answer questions for twenty minutes instead of reading a manual, and get back a setup sheet for your own business. |
| File | What it is | What it does for you |
|---|---|---|
| 00 START HERE | What to open first, in what order, and what breaks if you skip a step. | You install it in the right order instead of opening four files at once and finishing none of them. |
| 01 Why Good Work Does Not Close Itself | The reasoning. Read it before you change anything. | You stop treating a closing problem as a price problem, which is the most expensive misdiagnosis in this trade. |
| 02 The Field Guide Word, editable | The standard. Nineteen chapters on running an appointment start to finish. | One way of running the appointment, written down, so the hour that decides the job stops depending on who showed up. |
| 02 The Field Guide - the book | The long version, and the reasoning behind every line of the standard. | Somebody can argue with the standard properly instead of quietly ignoring it. |
| 02 The Nine Steps - print this and put it in the vehicle | The whole hour on one page you can tear out and keep in the truck. | Nobody has to remember it. That is the point of putting it in the truck. |
| 03 The Comparison Builder Word, editable | The page you leave with somebody who is getting other quotes. | The customer comparing three quotes has something in their hand that compares them on what actually differs. |
| 04 The Nine Objections Word, editable | The nine things customers actually say, and what to say back. | A new person is not inventing an answer on a driveway with a customer watching. |
| 05 The Facts Page Word, editable | Every number and claim anybody is allowed to say out loud. | What gets promised stops varying by who promised it, which is where warranty arguments start. |
| 06 The Lead Log - a guide for whoever keeps it | Four minutes, for anybody who has to fill the log in. Hand it out. | Whoever keeps the log can be handed four minutes of reading instead of a training session. |
| 06 The Lead Log Spreadsheet | One row per lead. Stage derived from dates rather than typed. | A lead with no dated next step surfaces whether or not anybody noticed it. |
| 07 The Six Modules, trainer copy Word, editable | How to run each of the six weeks. What good looks like and what to watch for. | Somebody other than you can run it, and it is the same every time. |
| 07 The Six Weeks, on your own Word, editable | The same six weeks, with drills built for one person. Fifteen minutes a week. | Fifteen minutes a week, alone, and you still end up somewhere by the end of six. |
| 08 The Six Modules, team copy Word, editable | The same six weeks from the other side. What to read and what happens in the room. | What the person being trained reads, so the training does not depend on the trainer remembering what to cover. |
| 09 The Meeting Format Word, editable | One hour a week, the same shape every week, and the three ways it stops working. | You are told in advance how this meeting dies, so you recognize it before it has. |
| 09 The Weekly Hour, on your own Word, editable | The same four numbers and the same mechanism, fifty minutes, one person. | The same four numbers and the same discipline with nobody to hold you to it. |
| 10 Hiring and the First Ninety Days Word, editable | What to screen for, the six questions that reveal it, and three thirty day plans. | You screen for process and self-correction rather than for closing stories, and the first ninety days are planned before the person starts. |
| 10 When To Hire, on your own Word, editable | The decision before the hiring. The three signals in your own lead log. | The call comes off your own log rather than off how busy you feel in a good month. |
| 11 Landed (the app) Browser tool | Paste a lead export and it shows close rate by area and by person, and whether a gap is real. | You find out whether a gap between two people is real or is a small sample, before you act on it. |
| 12 Shared Definitions | The same vocabulary in every kit, so any two of them work together. | Buy a second kit later and it drops in beside the first. No reconciling two sets of words. |
| LICENSE AND DISCLAIMER Text | One business, yours forever. Nothing expires. | Nothing renews, and no decision of ours can ever switch it off. |
| RUN IT WITH AI - copy this prompt Text | Runs the recurring pass with you, reading the queue the spreadsheet produced. | The monthly pass happens even in a month when you do not feel like doing it, because somebody else is asking the questions. |
| SET UP WITH AI - copy this prompt Text | Interviews you and fills the kit in around your business. | You answer questions for twenty minutes instead of reading a manual, and get back a setup sheet for your own business. |
| File | What it is | What it does for you |
|---|---|---|
| 00 START HERE | What to open first, in what order, and what breaks if you skip a step. | You install it in the right order instead of opening four files at once and finishing none of them. |
| 01 Why Commission Plans Leak Margin | The reasoning. Read this before you change anything. | You see how a plan that looked fair on the day it was written became expensive, without anybody doing anything wrong. |
| 02 Commission Plan Standard Word, editable | The plan itself. Rates, basis, floors, and what is commissionable. | The plan itself, written so the person being paid can check it. A plan nobody can check is a plan nobody trusts. |
| 03 Compensation Agreement Language Word, editable | Contract-ready clauses covering draw, rate, earned and payable. | Your attorney edits rather than drafts, which is the difference between an hour and a retainer. |
| 04 Margin Fail-Safe Fault Standard Word, editable | The three-test standard that decides when a margin miss is the salesperson's fault. | Decided before it happens instead of argued after, which is the only time anybody agrees to it. |
| 05 Commission Calculator Spreadsheet | Measures what your current plan actually pays as a share of what it earns. | It is usually not the number written in the plan, and this is how you find that out without an argument. |
| 06 Commission Statement Template Spreadsheet | The statement that goes to the salesperson every cycle. Every field sourced. | The salesperson gets a statement where every figure names where it came from, so the conversation is about the job and not about the math. |
| 07 Commission Reporting SOP Word, editable | Who produces the statement, where each figure comes from, and what happens to a dispute. | It stops being one person's job held in one person's head. |
| 08 Rollout Plan and 90-Day Scorecard Word, editable | The sequence from approval to launch, and the nine measures that say it worked. | A new plan gets judged on nine measures rather than on how the room felt in week two. |
| 09 Banked (the app) Browser tool | What a salesperson opens on their own phone. They log a job, it tells them what they earned. | Most of the reason somebody comes to ask you what they earned goes away. |
| 10 Banked - the salesperson's guide | Two pages you hand to the people who will use it. | Nobody has to be trained on it. |
| 11 Rollout Deck Slides, editable | The nine slides you stand in front of when you announce the plan, with speaker notes. | The meeting where you announce it decides whether it lands. This is that meeting, written down. |
| 12 Shared Definitions | The same vocabulary in every kit, so any two of them work together. | Buy a second kit later and it drops in beside the first. No reconciling two sets of words. |
| LICENSE AND DISCLAIMER Text | One business, yours forever. Nothing expires. | Nothing renews, and no decision of ours can ever switch it off. |
| RUN IT WITH AI - copy this prompt Text | Runs the recurring pass with you, reading the queue the spreadsheet produced. | The monthly pass happens even in a month when you do not feel like doing it, because somebody else is asking the questions. |
| SET UP WITH AI - copy this prompt Text | Interviews you and fills the kit in around your business. | You answer questions for twenty minutes instead of reading a manual, and get back a setup sheet for your own business. |
Two of these lists carry a file twice, numbered the same and marked on your own or not. You keep the one that is you and delete the other. Nothing is trimmed for a smaller business and nothing assumes a team you do not have.
Word documents you can edit, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs to print, and HTML for the browser tool. Nothing proprietary and nothing that needs a monthly fee to open.
Yes. Every workbook ships already calculated, which is what Google Sheets needs in order to open one at all. This was tested on the heaviest file in the line, and the tests that matter survive the import.
They are built for it. They are ordinary .xlsx files with ordinary formulas in them, nothing proprietary, no macros and nothing to enable. Twelve workbooks, sixty-one sheets, eighty-seven thousand formulas, and every one of them was opened and checked before it went in a box.
The one thing we cannot tell you is that a copy of Microsoft Excel has been opened on them, because there is no Excel installation here to test against, and we would rather say that than imply a test happened. If something misbehaves in Excel, tell us and it gets fixed the same week, and the thirty day refund covers you either way.
Yes, and you should. Every editable document opens with [COMPANY NAME] in it. Replace it and the document is yours. Your people should see their employer's name on the page they are filling in, not ours.
Stripe takes the payment and hands you straight back to the download. The same link is emailed to you and it works whenever you need the files again. There is no account and no expiring token.
This is the page for that. It is usually an email program cutting a long link in half.
Because the two alternatives are worse value and you have probably priced both. Software runs around two hundred dollars a month and takes your data with it the day you stop paying. A document pack runs from several hundred dollars into the thousands for a folder of blanks. Those are list prices off public pages, checked in September 2026, and what anybody actually pays is between them and the seller.
You pay the difference and nothing more. If you own a kit and later want all four as one system, what you already paid comes off the price. Nobody who buys today is worse off for having bought early, and no kit you already own gets repriced.
No. There is nothing to cancel because after the one payment there is nothing left to pay.
If a kit gets a corrected edition, you get it. Write from the address you bought with.
Yes, inside thirty days, for any reason, including that you read it and did not like it. How that works.
Everybody in the business that bought it, and there is no count. The license is one business, not one person and not one computer. Put it on a shared drive, print it, hand a copy to whoever fills it in. The line is redistribution: you may not sell it, give it away, or post it where anybody can download it.
Two separate businesses means two licenses. If it is one business with two locations or two trades under one roof, that is one. If you are not sure which yours is, ask before you buy rather than after.
Yes. That is what it is for, and the documents are editable for exactly that reason. It stays inside your business.
No. The kit works on its own and every file is usable with nothing but a spreadsheet program. The two prompts are there for people who already use an assistant and would rather answer questions than read.
Whichever you already have. The prompts are plain text and they are not written against any one product.
One interviews you and fills the kit in around your business, so you end up with your version rather than the generic one. The other runs the monthly or weekly pass with you, reading the queue your spreadsheet produced and working through what it means. Both are copy and paste.
No, in both directions. The books are the reasoning at full length. The kits are the files that do the work. Each is complete on its own.
Yes, and it is the same file. If you own the kit that carries it you already have the book and you should not buy it again.
Yes. The books page has a real sample of each, twenty-odd pages, cut at a chapter boundary rather than in the middle of a sentence.
No. Banked, Charted, Surfaced and Landed run entirely in your browser. What you paste in stays on the machine you pasted it into, and when you close the tab it is gone. There is no account and no server, and nothing you paste is transmitted. You can check that yourself by opening one with the wifi off. The one thing that can leave is an email address, and only if you type one into the box after a run and press the button.
Whatever you paste into an AI goes to whichever AI company you are using, on their terms, not ours. Both prompts say so at the top and both tell you what not to paste.
Stripe holds the payment record because it has to. We do not keep a list of who downloaded what, because the download link re-verifies with Stripe every time instead of tracking you. The privacy page says the rest.
Send the question. It gets answered, and then it gets added to this page so the next person does not have to ask.
These answer one question each. Notes are the long form: one argument to a page, written to be read on its own.