Busy, booked and still broke is not a personal failure. It is an arithmetic failure — and arithmetic can be fixed in an afternoon.
Your apprenticeship taught you the trade. Thousands of hours of it. Almost none of it covered what to charge.
So somebody asked, you had four seconds, and you said a number. That number has been the foundation of your business ever since.
It was probably too low. Not in a vague, know-your-worth sense — too low in the specific sense that it is beneath what it costs you to open the van door.
Each one produces a single number, and each one feeds the next.
From the two-week time log to the rate card that lives in your van door.
Ray, a solo electrician, from $85 an hour to $130 — with every sum shown.
That is the whole job, spread across ten evenings.
Every calculation in the book, as a spreadsheet that works in any language version of Excel. Type in the yellow cells; it does the rest.
Ten sheets, in the same order as the chapters. Sheet 5 gives you your rate.
You can price a job perfectly and still run out of diesel money, because being owed four thousand dollars and having four thousand dollars are not the same thing.
Book one is about what you are owed. Book two is about when it arrives — deposits, terms, and how to chase what you are owed without becoming the tradesman people warn each other about.
In preparation