Welding & Gas CFO Club Recap April 2026

Thanks to the crew that attended last month. This is one of our longer and more impactful sets of notes we’ve had. There was some really good discussion.

Meeting Notes

Key KPI’s for leaders

• Internal vs recruiters
• KPI’s need to be calculated in less than 5 minutes
  • Need to come out of a computer vs manual calcs
• Gas volumes
• Delivery fees
• New customer onboarding – running list and initial sales history
• Cylinder rent
• Sales– Gross Profit $’s across various categories
• Gas to sales ratio
• Inventory turns every month
• AP turnover rate – want to stay current with our vendors
• EOS – every team has their own scorecard, so they have KPI’s that are assigned to them, significant variance on the scorecard, use Bloom, anything that’s red has to have an action item – if you have something red, have to explain what’s going on
  • Over half the companies represented are EOS
  • Some use facilitators regularly, others less frequently, some go it alone
• Backlog – open orders, coming down the pipeline – booked but not invoiced
• OT – to see staffing
• Open positions – recruiting, how stressed is the environment for hiring
• Cash usage over the last 4 weeks
• Aged AR accounts over a certain threshold
• Incident tracking – work comp, auto, safety issue
• Heavy PowerBI users – ERP integrates very well
  • Dashboards created
  • Distribution
  • Admin – AR and AP
  • Production – cylinders filled
• Gross profit by driver – through Trackabout usage
  • Daily view of driver profitability – only cylinder drivers, looking to get there for bulk
    • Different route everyday
    • Weekly metric in their L10 – standards for different types of drivers and how many stops
    • If they’re red – look at that
    • Management team and routing/dispatch – maximize route efficiency and profitability
• Accountability with budgets – and expenses buckets categories, live feed of the expense detail
• Gross margin per hour by location (divided by number of hours worked), exclude rent
  • Branch manager can only effect so many things
  • Is labor covering your cost
• % of sales on contract – how locked in is the business
• Number of sales call made – and how many are prospect calls
• Order lead time
• Average number of open orders – that haven’t been fulfilled
• Net assets placed – net cylinders placed – going out vs coming in
  • Will show trend – growing vs shrinking – asset planning
• % of items actually in stock that we say is in stock
• Phone system – answer the phone every time a customer orders – if not available we track that – usually single digits per week
• Average delivery size – increasing delivery fees, unprofitable deliveries
• Slow moving inventory incentive
  • When it gets to 6 months
    • Incentivize sales to move it
    • Brings attention and eyes on it
  • Diver coming out of Tims – inventory dates in Diver or could pull it out of PowerBI
  • Qualify for bonus – i.e., 50/50, they keep 50% of the profit vs us
  • ESAB will buy the competitor’s inventory at 50%

Collections (thoughts from various distributors below)

• Doesn’t have a good collection agency they use
  • Mostly cylinder lease from 5-10 years ago
    • $150 cylinder renewal collection agency doesn’t care
  • One distributor doesn’t want to put the lien on customers
  • Doesn’t even try anymore, success rate is so small
  • Bank has offered to take some of this on
• Collection agency they like, success rate
  • Success rates very low, 1-2 out of 10
  • Send letter that says we’ll bill you for loss of use, send certified
• We’ll write off the lease of the rent, but we want the tank back
• Track cylinders through Tims with tags
  • Shows GPS where the scans go – through the mobile device with a signature
  • Big investment, but it’s worth it, because of the data
• One distributor recommended no lease over a year
  • If so, we can automatically charge their credit card
• Automatically suspending the account if they’re beyond their credit limit
  • Won’t take order if they haven’t received a payment
  • Credit releases vs not allowing the salespeople to go beyond the credit limit
  • Had Tims help
  • Setup credit code, use mass change to apply to all customers, then had government and others that he could turn off credit code for exceptions
• On hold process that’s forward looking
  • Spits out to finance collections team
  • Notify dispatch until we talk to the customer and let them know
  • Commissions are tied to collections – % of accounts within term, they’re invested in it, they can see the number of accounts with passed dues or over 60 days
    • Release commission on a monthly basis regarding % collected
    • Don’t charge for write off
    • You don’t get paid until we get paid – I’m the salesperson and don’t want to be the bad guy – sales get the right people connected, bridges the gap

Next potential topics (6/17 meeting)

• Ownership: more with less
• Internal Controls
• Cylinders with inventory – treat cylinders like fixed assets
• AI – who’s using what
• AP/ACH Automation process – vetted some, but trying to rationalize cost

As always, please don’t hesitate to send ideas for future discussions over to me. Hope to see some of you down in OKC at the GAWDA SMC!