Phones didn't stop. Trucks stayed busy. You looked at what you paid yourself at the end of the year, and thought: that's it?
You did the work. The business grew. The effort was there.
The money isn't.
And it's not because you're running a bad business. It's because what feels like profit usually isn't.
There are three places this breaks:
The costs that don't show up until the end of the year.
The price that felt right but wasn't.
The money you made that hasn't arrived yet.
This article is the first one.
The job felt profitable. It wasn't.
Not because anything went wrong, but because some of the real costs never showed up in a way you could see. They sit in the background. They accumulate quietly.
Here's what it looks like when you finally see it all in one place.
The Full Picture
None of those numbers are fun to track. But most of them don't move much: your vehicle costs, your insurance, your burden rate. Calculate them once and you've got visibility you didn't have before. Watch your net profit change as you adjust pricing to take those costs into account. More on pricing in next week's article.
Do This Once
Start Here
There's a number in your business that's worth calculating. It's what it costs you to exist before you run a single job.
Vehicles. Insurance. Software. Your own pay. Office. Overhead.
Add it all up. That number doesn't change whether you're busy or slow. And it's the number your revenue has to clear before you make anything.
Most owners need this. Few hear it. Pass it on.
Next issue
Next week: the price that felt right but wasn't. The second place this breaks has nothing to do with costs. It's the number you quoted, and what it actually needed to be.
