Business consulting for mechanical contractors who are busy but not sure they are profitable

The margin problem hiding in a full schedule

A full schedule tells you that you are cheap enough. It does not tell you that you are profitable. The two most common causes are simple arithmetic, and both are easy to check.

The first is markup confused with margin. If your estimator adds 20% to cost, your gross margin on that job is 16.7%, not 20%, because the margin is measured against the selling price. A shop that believes it runs a 20% margin and actually runs 16.7% has a hole in its overhead budget it cannot see.

The second is an hourly rate built from wages instead of real labour cost. Take a technician paid $40 an hour. Add, say, 30% for payroll taxes, workers' compensation, vacation and benefits, and the hour costs $52. If that person is paid for 2,080 hours a year but only 1,500 of them are billable, each billable hour costs about $72 before a single dollar of rent, trucks or office wages. Our guide to the burdened labour rate walks through the full calculation with your own numbers.

What we work on

Six areas cover nearly every engagement. Each has its own page explaining what is included, how long it takes and how we measure it.

• Pricing and estimating discipline: selling rates, flat-rate books and bid pricing built from cost
• Job costing and project margins: estimate-versus-actual tracking, change orders and margin fade
• Capacity and hiring plans: crew hours, backlog and seasonal hiring
• Service-versus-construction mix: which kind of work to grow, and what it does to cash
• Owner time and management structure: getting the owner out of every estimate and every dispatch decision
• Exit planning: a business a buyer or successor can run, with sale work through Sedighi.ca and BizSell.ca

If you are not sure where to start, the services overview explains how to choose, based on the symptom you are seeing.

What we are, and what we are not

We are business and marketing consultants for mechanical contractors. We look at your numbers, your estimating habits, your crew plan and your time, and we help you make better decisions with them. We do not offer engineering, mechanical design, inspection or code-compliance services, we never install or repair anything, and we do not prepare your financial statements or tax returns; your accountant does that. When a question belongs to a regulator, an accountant or a lawyer, we say so and point you there.

Proof from our HVAC work

Our published results come from HVAC and heating companies, where Ali has built 150+ live websites and much of this method. They are results from our HVAC work, and the useful lesson for a mechanical owner is the economics behind them. HVACDeal.ca produced 500+ leads at a 12:1 ROI. CombiBoiler.ca reached a 300% ROI with 300+ monthly leads. GasBoilers.ca began as a new gas-boiler division for CANRO Heat, which is a service-mix decision as much as a marketing one, and it now reaches 26+ BC communities.

A return figure only means something when you know what a job is worth, what it costs to win and how many your crews can deliver. That is the same discipline we bring to pricing and capacity. The results page explains what each case shows and what carries over to a mechanical firm.

Coverage across Canada

We work with mechanical contractors in all 10 provinces and 3 territories. Regulators, heating fuels, seasons and sales tax differ a great deal: a gas-heated Prairie market behaves nothing like electrically heated Quebec, and an Atlantic shop riding heat-pump programs plans its year differently from a Vancouver boiler specialist. The areas we serve page links to a page for each region, with the regulators to know and the programs that shape demand, as of October 2026.

Who is behind MechanicalConsulting.ca

MechanicalConsulting.ca is part of the Sedighi.ca and SAZ.ca group of companies. It is a Canadian business, headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, and led by Ali Sedighi, MBA in Technology Management, who has 17+ years of experience since founding his first digital marketing agency in 2007. It sits under BusinessConsulting.ca, the group's consulting practice, and uses its published rates.

If you want the background first, the about page covers how an engagement runs and pricing lists every rate. If you would rather just talk it through, the contact page explains what to send; even a two-line text to (604) 632-4959 about your shop's size and biggest headache gets things moving.