Operations & Profitability for Service Businesses

Your best-looking account might be losing you money.

Still Human Systems shows service business owners what labor actually costs and what every account really makes — then builds the systems that keep it visible.

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Prefer to talk it through? Book a free Operational Clarity Review 30 minutes. A diagnostic, not a sales call.

One Real Account · Anonymized
The account that looked like a winner.
Monthly revenue $8,875
Crew hours on the account 153
Labor at true loaded cost$43.29 per labor-hour — not the wage −$6,623
Irrigation subcontractor −$2,800
Net · every month −$548
Strong revenue. Busy crew. Quietly losing money — until the real numbers were put next to it. Finding leaks like this one is what Still Human Systems does.
The Real Problem

Busy does not mean profitable.

A service business can be booked, staffed, and invoicing — and still be under pressure every month. The owner works all day. The crew is out early. Customers are paying.

But payroll still feels heavy, cash flow feels tight, and nobody can say which accounts carry the business and which ones quietly drain it. That is not an effort problem. It is a visibility problem — and effort can't fix what you can't see.

Once the numbers become visible, the right decision becomes obvious.

A Real Business

This company was borrowing money to make payroll.

A growing, multi-crew landscaping business in South Florida. Revenue looked healthy. The crews were busy. And every pay cycle was a scramble — with no one able to say which accounts were actually profitable.

So we did the thing nobody had done: tracked the real hours, calculated the true loaded cost of a labor-hour, and applied it account by account. The picture changed immediately.

$37.50 → $43.29
What a crew hour actually cost. $1,800 per crew-day ÷ 6 workers ÷ 8 hours is $37.50 — and $43.29 once taxes, comp, and overhead are loaded in. Every price had been set without knowing this number.
5 years
How long key account prices had gone untouched while labor, fuel, and insurance climbed. Nobody had raised them — because nobody could see they were underwater.
−$548 / mo
What the "best" account on the route was really doing, once true labor cost and a subcontractor were counted. That's the ledger above. It had looked like a winner for years.

The work didn't change. The visibility did. Pricing moved where the numbers said it should, the leak closed, and payroll and taxes were covered without borrowing. Still Human Systems exists to do exactly that inside other service businesses.

Two Ways In

Start where you are.

You don't need it all figured out to begin. Pick the door that fits where you are right now.

Free · 11 Questions · 3 Minutes

Not sure where profit is leaking?

Answer 11 questions and find out how much of your business you're running blind on. Three minutes, no email required, a clear score at the end.

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Free Download

Already tracking hours?

See what those hours already cost you — and the gap between the wage you pay and your true loaded labor cost.

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What We Do

Diagnosis first. Then the fix.

Every engagement starts by seeing the business clearly. The work deepens only as far as the numbers say it should.

01 · The Diagnosis

Profitability Assessment

The paid deep dive. Your true loaded labor cost, the real profit on every account, margin and pricing analysis — and a clear list of what to reprice, keep, or drop.

Fixed fee, scoped on your free Clarity Review. The Review always comes first.

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02 · The Systems

Operations Intelligence Systems

Custom systems that turn daily crew hours, payroll, job costing, and admin work into reporting the owner actually uses — so the visibility doesn't fade when the engagement ends.

03 · The Partnership

Fractional Operations Support

Ongoing support for owners who want an operational mind inside the business — sharper reporting, steadier systems, better decisions — without hiring a full-time operations manager.

Yanny Leal, founder of Still Human Systems
The Founder

Built by the person who had to fix the numbers.

I run the back office of a working, multi-crew landscaping company in South Florida — payroll, invoices, collections, pricing, job costing, and the daily mess owners usually carry in their head.

Still Human Systems wasn't created in a boardroom or by a software company. It was built at that desk, while the real business was running.

"If the business is working this hard, why does the money still feel unclear?"

That question became labor tracking, true-cost math, pricing reviews, and account-level visibility — and it turned the business around. The losing account in the ledger at the top of this page? I'm the one who found it.

Everything Still Human sells started as something a real business needed on a Thursday night.

Yanny Leal
Founder, Still Human Systems
The Methodology

The systems behind the strategy.

The tools are not the business — they're the operating structure underneath it. Each one moves labor, payroll, and pricing decisions out of memory, texts, and scattered files, and into numbers you can act on.

Free · Entry Point

Crew Hours Lite

See what your hours already cost.

A free, simple tracker for crew hours — with a calculator that turns them into a labor-cost number, and shows the gap between the wage you pay and what an hour truly costs.

Crew Hours Lite — hours-to-cost calculator showing 83 hours at $22 equals $1,826
Get Crew Hours Lite →
System · Labor

Crew Payroll OS

Stop typing payroll by hand.

Your crew already texts their hours. The WhatsApp AI Import turns those messages into payroll-ready rows — no retyping — catches mistakes before payday, and shows real, loaded labor cost by job, employee, and month.

Crew Payroll OS dashboard — labor cost by month and top accounts by hours
Explore Crew Payroll OS →
In Development

Profit OS

See what every account actually makes.

The next system in the Still Human stack — per-account profitability and true cost per labor-hour, so leaks like the one at the top of this page can't hide. Shown here as a preview of the analysis it produces.

Profit OS preview — profit and loss ranked by account

Not sure which fits? Start with the free Operational Clarity Review — it will tell you.

Free · 30 Minutes · Not a Sales Call

Start with a free Operational Clarity Review.

A 30-minute diagnostic conversation. We walk through how you actually run the business and find where your visibility breaks down. You leave with more clarity than you walked in with — client or not. That's the standard.

  • How your crew hours get tracked and verified
  • Your true labor burden — what an hour really costs you
  • Where account-level profitability is invisible
  • Where pricing and payroll run on memory
  • Your biggest operational blind spot
  • The one thing most worth fixing in the next 90 days
Book your Operational Clarity Review →

Want exact numbers afterward? The paid Profitability Assessment is where we calculate your true loaded cost and the real profit on every account. The Review comes first — always.

Stop guessing.
Start deciding.

One focused conversation about how you run the business, where the visibility breaks down, and what's worth fixing first.

Book your free Review →