You are probably charging too little
Ask ten service business owners how they set their prices and nine will tell you some version of the same two answers: it felt about right, or the shop down the street charges that. Neither one of those knows what your month costs. Here is the math that does.
The number almost nobody knows
Your real cost per hour. Not your rent. Not your supplies. All of it, divided by the hours you actually sell.
Add up everything the business pays in a month. Rent, insurance, phone, software, supplies, your own pay, the truck note, all of it. Then count the hours you genuinely bill in a month, not the hours you are open. Those are different numbers and the gap between them is where the money goes.
Why the shop down the street is a bad ruler
You do not know their rent. You do not know if the owner pays themselves. You do not know if they are three months from closing. Copying a price is copying somebody else's guess about somebody else's costs.
Price the job, not the hour
Once you know your cost per hour, quote whole jobs against it. A customer hears "two hundred for the job" better than "eighty an hour for two and a half hours, probably." And it stops punishing you for getting faster, which is the strangest thing about hourly pricing: the better you get, the less you make.
The test for a price that is too low
If nobody ever flinches, it is too low. Some flinching is the price being correct. If literally every customer says yes immediately and you are still tired and broke at the end of the month, that is not a marketing problem.
What's in the full calculator
The math above is one tab of a five-tab spreadsheet with the formulas already built: My Costs, Price a Job, Service Menu, Monthly Check, and a Start Here page. It shows three suggested prices for every job at 30, 40, and 50 percent margin, then shows your real profit on whatever you actually charge. There is a worked example in it too, a brake job priced start to finish, so you can watch it work before you put your own numbers in.
The Simple Price & Profit Calculator · $17
Your real numbers, in about twenty minutes
Real Excel formulas, not a blank template. Price your ten most common jobs once and quote them in seconds after that.
Open the store