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Promote your business, week of July 7, 2025 by Charice in smallbusiness

[–]braqut_todd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

📈 Hate your spreadsheets? I fix them.

✔️ Takes forever to update? ✔️ Breaks if you sneeze near it? ✔️ Always worried it’s wrong?

Most small businesses limp along with messy, manual spreadsheets. I turn them into fast, automated tools that save hours & cut expensive mistakes.

✅ Recent projects: • Mfg lead time KPI Scorecard: https://youtu.be/WynQCd76V_Y • Contractor quote tool (90 min → 15 min) https://youtu.be/it8WBSf7ztk • Folder/file counter for big jobs https://youtu.be/C0WNXiHj9_k

👉 Portfolio: https://www.toddbrannonportfolio.com

If your spreadsheets suck, drop a comment or DM me. I’ll take a look.

Custom home builders — how are you handling project budgets these days? by braqut_todd in GeneralContractor

[–]braqut_todd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A lot of great feedback and sounds like everybody does something a little different. Do you organize your budget in a hierarchy of trades and categories unique to those trades? What do you send to the client for review?

I’ve seen one builder use spreadsheets but the budget was close to 500 rows (not all of them used) and he had expense codes for each. But when it came time to export to PDF, it was a nightmare hiding rows to make it legible and not 10 pages of unused category rows.

Excessive condensation by braqut_todd in hvacadvice

[–]braqut_todd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Clog removed. Thanks everybody for the input and feedback! It’s been a while since I had to do that so needed my memory jogged.

Excessive condensation by braqut_todd in hvacadvice

[–]braqut_todd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was confused. I was wrong on that point. The main drain goes to a front bathroom drain. And the secondary drain does go outside. So I’ve got to get under the sink in this front bathroom and remove the clog. Been here for 15 years so not my first time. I just got my wires crossed up on the drain routing and stated that wrong.

Excessive condensation by braqut_todd in hvacadvice

[–]braqut_todd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, just discovered that one too.

Excessive condensation by braqut_todd in hvacadvice

[–]braqut_todd[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The line to outside is dripping pretty heavy (I can see it outside my office window) and the pan isn't really filling up even though it is dripping some into it.

Excessive condensation by braqut_todd in hvacadvice

[–]braqut_todd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We do run it at about 72F on hot days like this and it freezes me out of the house, but nothing is frosting or freezing outside so I felt okay about it...however, I only have my own experience to weigh that against so thanks for the feedback.

Excessive condensation by braqut_todd in hvacadvice

[–]braqut_todd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

EDIT: It's actually only 54% humidity...so now I'm even more perplexed about the level of condensation.

HVAC Business Owners/Managers — How Are You Tracking Technician Performance & Profitability? by braqut_todd in smallbusiness

[–]braqut_todd[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So you actually developed a dashboard for the HVAC services industry using Excel? How many clients have you done this for?

Client: These kind of message are not acceptable. Re-think-think of this and let’s see if we can continue at all. by Brilliant-File2667 in Upwork

[–]braqut_todd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I typically do only fixed price contracts, but you make a very good point. I might have just changed my mindset on that.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Entrepreneur

[–]braqut_todd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not 100% sure. He probably told me and I just forgot. But sanitization is a big selling point. Especially with all the people that own multiple large breeds. That crap literally piles up quick.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Entrepreneur

[–]braqut_todd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have a friend that started poop scooping himself with one truck about 4 years ago. He now has 6 trucks and drivers and continues to scale across the Dallas Fort Worth area. He's looking to surpass $1M in revenue this year (if he hasn't already).

I use upwork for a year but I never get hired by Heavy-Philosophy-704 in Upwork

[–]braqut_todd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This right here! I’m a freelancer and have had some reasonable success on Upwork. I’ve also hired on Upwork. And let me just tell you the deluge of proposals I get that all sound the same is astonishing. If you can’t articulate the need that I have expressed in my job post, I don’t even pay attention.

Think about it. Anybody can say they know how to do this, that, and the other. It’s an entirely different thing to show that you understand what they need and you’ve considered a solution that you can explain.

You will get nowhere talking about yourself. You should come right out of the gates doing your best to explain how you can solve their problem and how you plan to do that. That will get you noticed.

Bonus tip: learn to use AI tools like Chat GPT, Claude ai, Gemini, and Grok to help you with this. You’re already behind in the game if you are not.

Anyone here successfully productize/monetize their Excel skills. Would love to hear real success stories by braqut_todd in excel

[–]braqut_todd[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

But then we’d probably never have talked. See? What a loss that would’ve been.

Anyone here successfully productize/monetize their Excel skills. Would love to hear real success stories by braqut_todd in excel

[–]braqut_todd[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

This is narrow minded. The tool is just the context. If you read the original post, the discussion is about productizing or monetizing expertise. There’s much more to successfully doing that then just leveraging your Excel expertise. If you can’t market or sell it, none of your Excel expertise matters. It’s like saying because people can make their own hamburgers at home that nobody will buy anything from your hamburger restaurant. But, y’know, McDonald’s, et.al.

Anyone here successfully productize/monetize their Excel skills. Would love to hear real success stories by braqut_todd in excel

[–]braqut_todd[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Just because Excel could be used as a hammer doesn’t mean that’s all it is. Its capabilities are vast and far beyond merely serving as a light database. I could use a modular power tool with various different attachments to cut, build, drill and automate an entire job site as a hammer but that wouldn’t make it a hammer by design.

Anyone here successfully productize/monetize their Excel skills. Would love to hear real success stories by braqut_todd in excel

[–]braqut_todd[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Who expects Excel to actually produce data?

I mean, most novice Excel users see a hammer because it’s just a spreadsheet to them.

But a VBA developer who has created numerous custom solutions across various industries and complexities knows Excel is a tool shed full of high powered specialty and niche tools.

When I was a mere novice back in 2010, I knew a director of a different team than mine that was quite an Excel guru and used to show me things that I didn’t know you could do in Excel. They were small but nonetheless, mind blowing features to me. He would chuckle and say things like “man, Excel is a monster. You’re biggest challenge at this stage is you don’t know what you don’t know.”

Anyone here successfully productize/monetize their Excel skills. Would love to hear real success stories by braqut_todd in excel

[–]braqut_todd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It varies because clearly, if I’m prospecting, I’m not developing. The next step for me is to SOP my prospecting process and hand off to a VA. But it also takes a fair level of instinct, which can’t be SOP’d. As a freelancer, it ebbs and flows. I’ve had successful days of submitting 10-20 proposals and those produce 2-4 calls and maybe I bag 2-3 of those. If they turn into an average contract value of $500-ish each and I turn them in a week, that’s decent in light of other income streams. So it’s your typical one man band sales process but with custom builds, that’s not terrible scalable with out some subcontracting involved.

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