A twenty-minute repair is never a twenty-minute job. By the time you've driven there, diagnosed it, cleaned up, written it up and chased the invoice, a small call has eaten most of a morning. This works out the floor below which showing up costs you money.
Raising a minimum is easier when the number came from arithmetic instead of nerve. I'll send you the working so you have it.
Setting the number takes ten minutes. Saying it out loud to a customer who's used to paying less takes longer, and that's the part the book spends more time on — how to raise a price without losing the work you want, and which work you should be happy to lose.
The business side of a skilled trade: what to charge, which jobs pay, and what it's worth without you. Twenty-one tools.
Not out yet. The form above is how you'll hear when it is.
Because the invoice looks fine. Eighty-nine dollars for twenty minutes of work reads like a good hourly rate, and it feels like one when you write it. The problem is the twenty minutes isn't what the job consumed.
Add the drive, the setup, the diagnosis, the cleanup, the conversation on the doorstep, the invoice, and the reminder you sent two weeks later. That's a couple of hours of your day gone. At a break-even rate of $95, you needed something north of $200 before you made a cent.
This is why owners who feel busy end the year with nothing. It isn't the big jobs. It's a steady diet of small ones priced on the time spent turning the wrench rather than the time consumed.
Note the division on the last line. To keep 15%, you divide by 0.85 rather than adding 15% — adding gets you 13% and the difference compounds across a couple of hundred calls a year.
These get used interchangeably and they're different things. Picking the wrong one is how you end up arguing on a doorstep.
Most one-truck operations do best with a straight minimum charge, because it's the one you can say on the phone in a single sentence without it sounding like a negotiation.
The fear is that a higher minimum drives customers away. Some of it will. The question is which ones, and the answer is usually the ones costing you money.
A few things that make it land better:
It varies enormously by trade and area, and the honest answer is that what other people charge is a poor guide — it's how everyone ended up underpriced together. What matters is whether your number covers your floor. If your calculated minimum is well above what's normal locally, that's usually a signal your drive times are long or your overhead is high, and both are worth looking at directly.
Yes, and it's usually less of a problem than you expect. Where owners get into trouble is waiving it quietly and often, until the exception is the rule and a third of the book is on a rate nobody agreed to.
It still consumed the drive, the office time, and the slot in your day. You're not charging for five minutes of work — you're charging for the two hours that five minutes cost. That's the sentence to have ready, because you'll need it.