What is ROES? Return on Effort Spend, explained
Every owner has heard of ROAS, return on ad spend. Put $1,000 into ads, see what comes back. It's a good number. It's also only half the story, because it only sees the money.
Most of what a home service owner puts into growth isn't money. It's time. The networking breakfast every Thursday. Door knocking on Saturday. The posts you write at 10 at night. Calling back every lead a lead service sends you. None of that shows up in an ad report, so it all looks free.
It isn't free. You pay for it with hours. ROES puts those hours on the same scoreboard as your dollars.
The math
Two lines. That's all it takes.
Real cost = dollars spent + (hours × what an hour is worth)
ROES = gross profit ÷ real cost
Use gross profit, not sales. Gross profit is the price minus the job cost: materials, labor, subs, permits and equipment. Use sales instead, and a channel can look like a winner while it quietly loses money.
How to read it
- Under 1x: it's costing you money. Fix it or stop.
- 1x to 3x: it's working. Keep it and make it better.
- 3x or more: double down. Move money and hours here.
An example month
Say an hour of your time is worth $100.
A lead service costs you $1,000 in fees and 5 hours of calling back. Real cost: $1,500. It brings in $4,800 in gross profit. ROES: 3.2x. Double down.
A networking group costs $100 in dues and 16 hours a month. Real cost: $1,700. It brings in $2,000 in gross profit. ROES: 1.2x. Make it better.
Door knocking costs nothing in dollars and 20 hours of your time. Real cost: $2,000. It brings in $1,600 in gross profit. ROES: 0.8x. Fix it or stop.
The one that charges is the winner. The one that felt free is losing money.
Four rules so the number tells the truth
- Use gross profit, not sales. $2 back in sales at a 40% margin is 80 cents of profit for every dollar in. That's a loss.
- Give an hour one price. Use what you'd pay someone to do that work, and use the same number for every channel.
- Give slow channels 90 days. Referrals and partners are seeds, not fruit. Don't pull them up before they grow.
- Hand off the effort. A channel that's 1x on your hour can be 3x on someone else's.
Then add the multiplier
Two channels can have the same ROES and still not be worth the same. A channel you can measure and scale is worth more, because you can put more in and see exactly what comes back. In the playbook, that channel gets a ×1.5 multiplier. One that's only measurable or only scalable gets ×1.25. Word of mouth, which you can't measure or turn up, gets ×1.
ROES times the multiplier is your growth score. The highest score gets your next dollar. One rule: a channel under 1x never gets a multiplier. Losing money is losing money, however easy it is to scale.
Where ROES comes from
Our founder Coach AK coined ROES in Run It Like They Would, our free playbook for home service owners. He put the whole idea in one line: "Who cares if they charge you? The question is, do you get a return on the effort?"
You don't judge a workout by whether it was free. You judge it by whether it made you faster. Your marketing works the same way.
The worksheets to score every channel are in the free playbook. Rather run the numbers with us? Book a free revenue audit.
Not sure where your business stands yet? Our free Growth Ladder assessment takes about four minutes.
- Run It Like They Would, The Next Right Move (2026)
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